Hey you, future SWE (if you aren't already) welcome back to another article. In this one, I will be detailing my experience of the induction period and what you may expect (or not- some things may look different or improved).

There will be a welcome on-board assignment where you'll be acquainted with the code of conduct of ALX. Read it and make sure you understand what is expected of you. They will give you guidelines in general. You will also hear/read the phrase "Do hard things". Indeed you are here to do hard things and you have to carry that with you for the next 12 months. You can do it!

You will be doing peer-to-peer evaluations- meaning you will be scoring each other for the first few weeks on assignments. Make sure to score others fairly. Reach out to the person on Slack if you feel their project isn't up to standard. Don't just score 0. Download google docs and work from there when needed. So you can copy the URL and paste it so people can evaluate your work. You will understand everything soon enough.

Also, prepare yourself for 24-hour deadlines on 95% of your projects. But don't panic, there are first and second deadlines, however, the score you can get decreases with each deadline so be careful of that. Make sure to attend live learning sessions on Youtube or watch the recorded one if you're not available. A lot of information is shared by the mentors, on Slack as well.

The first few assignments will be easy then a few of them require research (such as Map your mind)

You will be introduced to Git and Github. Git is a code management tool that allows different programmers to work on the same project independently. GitHub is a website that provides you with a server to host your code. You will push all your ALX assignments to GitHub so that they could be checked and scored. On group projects you will be pushing to the same repo- but don't worry about all of that for now. You will soon learn everything. You will also learn the shell and how to navigate it. Creating new files, copying, removing, renaming and moving are all things you will get to learn. It was overwhelming at first but now it's second nature so don't stress.

The next thing you'll need to know is emacs and vi editors. I will put a few cheatsheets below that you can look at. I prefer emacs.

For C programming - check out Neso Academy, Freecodecamp on YouTube

NB: I am not affiliated with or endorsed by ALX. The opinions and views I share are purely my own.