I’ve been working at Agile Collective for the past week for my work experience and overall I think it's been great! A major plus is that the office is right next to Atomic Burger...
Agile Collective is a cooperative company and it has been really interesting to see how a cooperative functions differently from a normal company. Over the week there has generally been a good variety of tasks, including online courses that have taught me about coding and website building, projects that have been useful for the company, and other jobs where I’ve been extra manpower to help out with day to day office jobs.
One of the good things was that I feel I got to understand most, if not all, of the stages of making a website. On the first day I attended a meeting with a client to discuss the wireframe of their new website. A wireframe is just the base layout of a webpage, placing where everything will go etc. I then drew up the final draft of one of the pages on a computer. This is one of the first steps to building a site.
I also took some courses on HTML and CSS, both of which are coding languages, so that I could fully understand the basics. This sort of thing I really enjoyed. I then moved on, about half-way through the week, to create an example website using a program called Drupal. This is the program that Agile Collective uses to create its websites. There I learnt how we can use the wireframes to construct a web page. It was very interesting learning how Drupal works, however, unfortunately I did not have enough time to fully explore all of its features.
Learning about the cooperative workplace was also a good experience. I sat in one of CoCo (Coordinating Committee) meetings that helped me see how it works. Everyone gets a say in how things are done, and what should be improved. No-one is higher than everyone else and everyone's ideas are heard. This creates a very nice, community atmosphere in the office.
I have been interested in coding for a while but haven't had a good opportunity to learn it properly. This week has been a perfect chance to do some more and see how it could be applied. As well as this I have experienced an interesting work environment.