Original post. More oSoc16 awesomeness.

Good old memories… of last week

I remember it profoundly.

Exiting the train station of Brussels North, the fresh wind wholeheartedly introducing the monster high fancy buildings.
Clean and open space led to the various entrances of the monumental glass castle towers, one of which expected me among the 23 other students.

Fear and uncertainty awaiting patiently to be dived into once again.
The #oSoc16 experience was at hand.

Fear arose when the boss started speaking, the first drops of sweat appearing on the frightened foreheads of innocent students blessed with ignorance.

I can vividly recall the bliss I felt upon finding the source of eternal free coffee dispensing while munching the equally free coffee couques we had all received.

Indeed, on this first blessed day, the coffee couques came at an infinitely cheaper price than all the couques that would follow. Little did we know (I’m composing a requiem for Eveline as we speak)…

Instructions came, coffee was drank, t-shirts were given.
There was an awesome vibe in the air.

Excitement to deliver epic projects, a curious yet positive outlook on the following weeks, and of course, that feeling when you make a nerd joke and people actually get it.
My God, you have no idea how good that feels.

Meet the team

We’re working on a project for VIAA. Check out our faces in a professional work environment.

The guy behind the water bottle is Tjen, the shy looking lady pretending she’s unaware of me taking a picture is Eva, and the guy with only half a face is Brecht.
Rumors say he only has half faces when you take pictures of him.

Brecht is not a student for #oSoc16, he’s working for VIAA. But he’s working together with us on the project and helping us out with tons of stuff!
Him not being in the #oSoc16 VIAA team on paper, doesn’t undo his membership in the team in our hearts (aww).

And last but not least, famous in the underground nerd scene for being epic at everything and helping me to find jobs, Sander respectfully wasn’t bullied by picture spam under the ‘have to make a blogpost’ excuse. His coaching is pushing the quality of the complete package. Thanks to him, our code is clean, decent, readable and legit.

I suppose we forgot one team member though… ‘The dude in green or metal t-shirts’, author of silly blog posts, nominee for most caffeinated student in Brussels 2016, it’s none other than the infamous Laurens. Damn, it’s weird to introduce yourself.

This team is awesome. Seriously.
Seriously really very awesome.

Fortune was with me when fate decided to roll its dices and not only grant me the open Summer of code experience, but generously threw me in this team as well.

Eva’s need for polished results, Tjen’s attention to the importance of user experience, Brecht’s downright illegal skills in database queries and Sander’s answers to all our exotic approach decisions, make for an extreme ninja team that’s completely ready to nail the project in anime boss fight fashion!

And I wrote some HTML and stuff.

@VIAA

This blogpost isn’t just written from anywhere, it’s written from the unofficial VIAA basement office in Ghent!

Today we met more people of the VIAA team involved with the project, and received some precious feedback, goals, visions, and new perspectives.

And free food.

Learning way too much

Ok, so in school you’re supposed to learn a lot. As in, I was learning more in a month than I usually do in a year.

I’m completely honest when I utter my complete surprise of the learning speed at #oSoc16. It’s absolute and utter madness, frightening almost.

Every single day my mind has been blown, expectations got exceeded, knowledge has been fed, and confusion on vague and eccentric topics has been removed (well, more like ‘significantly reduced’, we’re still talking web development here).

I’ve grown more as a developer in these last 7 days than I have in the last year.

I’ve learned so much about people with various strengths in various aspects of what is in the end a common goal: the creation of awesome web projects.

We’re not even halfway, yet half a lifetime of experiences have been… experienced!
I’m calling it for now 🙂 Hope you had a good read!

PS: today I learned I can do the following:

(function() { 
    function fnction(fnction) { 
        fnction();
    }
    fnction(function() {
        alert('Laurens out');
    });
})();