Microsoft Leap Apprenticeship: My Experience Thus Far In.

So I’m guessing you are surfing the internet for past experiences on Microsoft Leap Apprenticeship, for Africans or in general. Or possibly stumbled on this, well it’s an interesting read. At the time of writing this article, I’m on week two on Microsoft LEAP Apprenticeship, Nigeria. Here’s my story:

I co-lead a non-profit organization known as Women In Machine Learning and Data Science, Lagos, that’s where I got the information about the LEAP program at Microsoft (perks of being part of a community, I guess). Precisely, 10th Dec 2019 I sent in my application for the program with fingers crossed 🤷‍♀️. Few weeks later, I was invited for an interview(truth be told, quite expected 😊) and got selected after the selection process amongst over five thousand 😮 applicants.

Prior to applying, I had worked as a Software Engineer/Product Designer at SMILE Communications Nigeria, APMIS Management Systems Limited and Carfax Nigeria. Although, I was on my personal time off (as a result of burnout) phase. During this time I take time out to set goals, review my career progression over the past years, unlearn and relearn while having fun as much as possible. So applying for the LEAP program at Microsoft was intentional, because I needed a not so usual learning experience to achieve my goal of being a Software Engineer(Technically grounded). There are Nine other awesome ladies 💐 that got selected for the LEAP program; Pelumi, Chidinma, Lola, Ada, Ndutim, Fatima, Ifeoma, Funmi and Louis, some of which are from a non technical background. The first month was focused on class room learning, afterwards we were assigned projects to work on as informed by our instructor.

All Ten of Us.

Furthermore, here is a list of activity during the first and second week of the program:

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WEEK ONE:

💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽💃🏽

The Microsoft LEAP program manager (West Africa), Princess Anya, launched the second cohort with welcoming remarks, introduced us to the Technical Instructor; Johnmark and I also had an opportunity of getting acquainted with other LEAPers. Next up was, setting up our laptops with various support tools for the program such as Visual Studio 2017 enterprise, SQL server management studio and other communication tools.

Afterwards, we had sessions on Software Engineering, Object Oriented design, applying S.O.L.I.D principles in development using C# with focus on some of the following topics:

• “Hello World” console application.
• Program structure.
• .NET Core.
• Comments.
• Statements.
• Variables.
• Constants.
• Types.
• Implicit types.
• Expressions.
• Operators.
• Casting and conversion.
• Strings.
• String operations.
• Enums.
• Structs.
• Console I/O.
• Command-line arguments.
• Logical expressions.
• Logical operators.
• Branching.
• Loops.
• Arrays.
• Multi-dimensional arrays.
• Functions.
• Optional parameters.
• Output parameters.
• Value types vs reference types.
• Reference parameters.
• Variable scope.
• And lots more ☺️

We had code labs for a variety of topics, it was an amazing learning experience for me, although most of these concept were familiar but there was need to unlearn and relearn. We also learnt Software Engineering Agile Best Practices; values and principles of Agile Methodology and lots more ☺️. We were tasked with preparing a personal development plan, so as to monitor key results in achieving our career goals.

WEEK TWO:

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Week two started with a recap of week one lessons, shared various experiences and challenges faced while implementing the code labs, it was quite interesting because it was more of an interactive class where everyone participated. In addition, week two was more in-debt, we learnt:

• Object Oriented design in C#
• Agile Planning and Portfolio management with Azure boards using Azure DevOps.
• Version controlling in Git with Visual Studio code and Github.
• Version controlling in Git with Visual Studio code and Azure DevOps.

The technical instructor(Mr John ☺️) went further on Introduction to Cloud Computing(Using Azure) where we covered concepts such as:

• Software As A Service.
• Platform As A Service.
• Infrastructure as A Service.
• And lots more ☺️.

We wrapped up the week with labs on Azure DevOps and Object Oriented design in C#.

Finally, it has been a worth while experience thus far. I’m looking forward to having more challenging learning experience. Special thanks to our technical instructor and Microsoft LEAP Program team. I intend to write part two of this as I progress in ‘The Experience’.

Viola!