This week, we have welcomed a new trainee in our team. He is still pretty green, but he had the right attitude to the job.

He escaped from Syria in 2015, coming to Germany with nothing. He then spent multiple months in a camp and after that he first started his education.

He is into coding for about 6 months now, starting with HTML and some very basic JS. For 2 months he started looking into C# (our „team“ language of choice).

So we did except a little but not too much. And we were about right. What I did not expect, because of other experience, was his attitude towards coding. Usually trainees came to it, because „there is good money in it and they don’t get dirty“. But he just likes to code.

I was talking to him and he was an artist in Syria and to him, coding is comparable to that. I am by far no artist, but I can relate to his argument. An argument I already read: It’s the process of creation.

Another aspect of his attitude: He comes and asks questions. And not just how to solve this or that, but how this works and why this behaves like that.
He is also proactive: He finished his job (a small API, to calculate Exchange Values between currencies) and right after it, he came to me and told me, that he would like to learn SQL. He saw, that we are using it quite a bit in our daily work and he wants to learn!

I was very impressed and I wanted to share that with you.

Don’t be afraid to ask and if you want to learn something, tell your team or boss. If it has the least value, you will most likely get the chance!

I told him, to pick up a tutorial, gave him some links, where he could read more and we expanded his Currency Exchange API to a banking Platform (from the view of a Bank) so there will be accounts, account owners and transactions. No security, though, that would add too much complexity for now.