My Experience as a mentee in Women Who Code Delhi — Week 1
After innumerable refreshes on my LinkedIn feed and my Gmail, I was elated when I received the confirmation mail for Women Who Code Delhi Mentorship Program.
As I wanted to utilize this 5-week opportunity to the maximum, I started penning down my queries after receiving the email. (You can sense my excitement reading this blog!) My mentor was Himanshi Goyal Ma’am. I was looking forward to her guidance as I found her profile close to Coding and I too love solving coding questions. I knew she will pave the right path for me.
After a brief introduction about the program, I had my first call with my mentor. She had such a friendly nature that it felt like talking to my own senior. All three mentee under her told about their interests and strong points. My fellow mentees were also competitive coders so it felt great to bond with them.
After the first meet, my mentor identified my strengths and weaknesses and advised us to give contests at Leetcode, Codechef and Google Kickstart to improve our accuracy and speed. Next, she made me aware of the Girl Script Summer of Code. And finally, she told me to build a web-game since I already had a fair experience in Full-Stack development.
Building a game was a whole new experience for me. I scanned the Internet and found an animation library Three.js which can be useful in rendering 3D animations. I tried making a game using it, but in a day, I realised that it wasn’t feasible to jump into 3D without knowing much about 2-Dimensions (Just Basic Maths). Again after googling for some time, I came across this wonderful Javascript library called Matter.js and it worked like a charm for me.
I decided to build a very simple clone of the Angry Birds game using this 2D physics engine. The whole week was an awesome experience. I spent my time understanding the documentation, going through tutorials, building scenes, revising my co-ordinate geometry and centre of mass concepts (Yes, I never knew such things are required for building a web game.) Here is the demo of the game. Contributions are always welcome.
Overall, this week was an amazing learning experience for me. It made me push my boundaries (Game Development) as well as staying in my comfort zone and improving it (Coding contests). I also had a talk with my co-mentees and got to know about some more opportunities. Looking forward to the upcoming weeks of this mentorship program.
