Benjamin Coke Blog Post - My Experience with the Scott Logic Graduate Training

_data/authors.yml

@@ -14,6 +14,7 @@ active-authors:
   - asaha
   - asegrove
   - ashing
+  - bcoke
   - awhitmell
   - bell-jones
   - bheyman
@@ -260,6 +261,10 @@ authors:
     name: "Andrew Whitmell"
     author-summary: "Developer based in Newcastle."
     picture: awhitmell.jpg
+  bcoke:
+    name: "Benjamin Coke"
+    author-summary: "Graduate Developer based in Newcastle."
+    picture: bcokepic.jpg
   bell-jones:
     name: "Benjamin Ell-Jones"
     author-summary: "Developer based in Bristol"
@@ -353,7 +358,7 @@ authors:
   dallsop:
     name: "Dan Allsop"
     author-summary: "I am a software consultant with over a decade of experience across several of the world’s leading financial institutions. Outside of software development my interests include game theory, behaviouristic psychology, and gardening."
-    picture: picture.jpg 
+    picture: picture.jpg
   dalucas:
     name: "Daniel Lucas"
     author-summary: "I am a Senior Fullstack Developer based in our Bristol office. I am passionate about empowering people, fostering continuous learning and shaping working practices that drive real value for organizations."
@@ -548,7 +553,7 @@ authors:
     name: "Jonathan Cardy"
   jcarstairs:
     name: "Joe Carstairs"
-    author-summary: "<p>Developer at Scott Logic. Find me on <a href=\"https://joeac.net\">joeac.net</a>.</p>"
+    author-summary: '<p>Developer at Scott Logic. Find me on <a href="https://joeac.net">joeac.net</a>.</p>'
     picture: picture.webp
   jcwright:
     name: "Jay Wright"
@@ -738,7 +743,7 @@ authors:
   nhume:
     author-summary: "I'm a delivery-focused leader with 20+ years of experience ensuring successful outcomes across public and private sectors. Proven track record of driving complex initiatives from concept to completion, aligning teams, stakeholders, and technology to deliver valuable outcomes. Currently a Delivery Principal based at Scott Logic's London office."
     name: "Nick Hume"
-    picture: nhume.jpeg  
+    picture: nhume.jpeg
   nowen:
     author-summary: "<p>I'm a Senior Developer at Scott Logic, with many years of C# experience. Recently I've immersed myself in JavaScript, including Angular and React."
     name: "Nick Owen"

_posts/2025-06-30-my-experience-with-the-scott-logic-gradutate-training.markdown

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+---
+title: My Experience with the Scott Logic Graduate Training
+categories:
+  - People
+tags:
+  - Training
+  - Graduates
+author: bcoke
+summary: Having just completed the Graduate Training at Scott Logic I wanted to reflect on the last three months and offer some advice to those who may be taking part in the future.
+---
+
+Hi!
+I’m Ben, I joined Scott Logic as a graduate software developer in March of 2025. This was a bit of a jump for me as it constituted a move from the windy rainy coast of Southeast Scotland to the windy rainy almost coast of Northeast England. Over the last three months I’ve taken part in the training program run by Scott Logic for new graduates. I’ve gained a lot over the course of the training and want to highlight some of the lessons I’ve learned while walking through my diary of the last few months.
+
+This is mostly aimed at new graduates who are coming after us and undertaking future graduate training at Scott Logic. Hopefully this will outline a roadmap of what you can expect from your training while also giving you several key pieces of advice that might have given me a leg up when I started.
+
+My post-hired experiences at Scott Logic started the Friday before the graduate introduction week, there was a small meet and greet with some of the new graduates and the staff who we would get to know more over the next few months. This was a good way to meet a few people and make the start of the programme a bit smoother. It was also when I met our Graduate Coordinator and our Graduate Training Officer, two faces I would get to know and appreciate very well over the following months.
+
+## Introduction Week
+
+Then, on the 24th of March, grad week kicked off – at the time feeling very much like a whirlwind. The days were filled with presentations and activities that introduced us to anyone and everyone from all over the company, most especially the Newcastle office. These presentations introduced the structure of the company, the key people, and the different functions that exist at Scott Logic. We learned about Scott Logic’s values and business ethics, had our HR induction, and got our laptops set up.
+
+These induction sessions were very exciting, and my best advice is to enjoy them. There is no exam, and everything that you learn, and everyone that you meet is an introduction – not a total experience. You will get to learn these ideas in more depth, and everyone you meet here you will meet again. This is a good time to join some Slack channels, see what other people in the company are talking about.
+
+## The Training Starts
+
+After the introduction week our training started in full. This was a quick introduction to the building blocks of web development: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are tools some of us had used before, and some hadn’t. This is fine, there was no expectation that we would walk through the doors as wizards. Just try to get your feet beneath you and get started. If you’re familiar with these technologies this is a great time to show off a bit and add a bit of flair into your work.
+
+This first week of training was when I met my mentor and my line manager. Your mentor is a daily contact who will help you find your feet with the training, make sure you’re working to best practices while completing the exercises, and give you extra directions to explore while you are learning. I feel very lucky to have had a mentor with a broad view of the technology landscape who was willing to donate her time to help me though issues and difficulties I faced while learning.
+
+You will have less frequent contact with your line manager, but they will still have check-ins with you regularly. These are to make sure you’re progressing through the training well and that you understand the feedback you’re being given. Your line manager will help you take care of your broader professional development while you’re with Scott Logic.
+
+One piece of advice I would give here, relevant even at the start of the training, is to get the best understanding of Git you can and to start working to best practices regarding commits and pull requests as early as possible. This will help make sure you are building good habits throughout your training. Showing your work to your mentor early and often is a great way to help them identify where you need to focus to improve and where you are already strong.
+
+## Object Oriented Programming
+
+After spending a week on the web technologies, we started our Java training. I had worked with Java before at university but there was a noticeable change to working on it in a professional environment. Unit testing, in particular, was something I was familiar with but had been quite lazy about. Now I have more focus not just on writing unit tests but writing them in a way that detects categories of error.
+
+This was the part of the training where it felt to me like everyone in the cohort stepped up a gear and was working with a bit more drive. I was often impressed by how others had approached the same problems I was working on with a very different approach.
+
+Here my advice is to use failure as a learning opportunity. Every time you get stuck on a bug and need help to get unstuck you deepen your understanding of the problem, the language, and the paradigm.
+
+## The Scott Logic Community
+
+It was during the Java training when I started attending some of the extra activities that are organised at Scott Logic. The lunch n’ learns are a relaxed and friendly way to hear talks about something interesting and new. These talks have been on a wild range of topics including things I know about and want to get more information on like Optionals in Java, and also things I’ve never heard of in completely new domains like a funky sudoku puzzle that Joel found interesting and wanted to tell people about.
+
+Another great idea at Scott Logic are the Communities of Practice. These are groups that self-organise around a specific function, like backend development or testing. They are an excellent venue for discussion of specific topics with those sub domains and have been a great way for me to listen to the considered wisdom of more senior developers. These talks give me a viewpoint into what developers care about at that level and what they are interested in pursuing further. They often offer links to methodologies or tools or ideas that I’ve never heard of or never considered using for myself.
+
+One thing that I’ve brought from these presentations and workshops into my work in the training is to take the opportunities to explain what you’re working on and to assist the others in your cohort with their work. Knowledge sharing is great for your peers and also helps deepen your own understanding of the topic.
+
+## Full Stack Training
+
+After two weeks of working on Java we moved on again to the full stack part of the training. Our frontend is built with Angular, our backend with Spring Boot. By working on both the frontend and backend pieces of the application we get a comprehensive view of the development of this kind of architecture. Because this is a larger project it took a bit more time to come together into a working application. Each feature takes longer to add and become complete. It was also my first introduction to dependency injection and inversion of control, which took me a bit of time to get my head around. Don’t worry about struggling with concepts like these, talk to people and ask for explanations. Plenty of people at Scott Logic have been happy to help me correct and refine my understanding of broader concepts.
+
+It was during the full stack training when we started regularly demoing our work in our stand-ups. When working with a client they will be curious and want to know what it is you have been working on. To ease us into this we had practice sessions where we showed our mentors our work and explain what we had been working on over the last week.
+
+Two pieces of advice I was given were to have a plan for my demo and to show the logical story of a feature. What I found was that the demo often turned into a bit of a Q&A about my website as a whole rather than just about the feature I was describing. This ended up giving me more feedback and more things to work on, so on the whole I thought it was quite good.
+
+From this point on the main work of our training was polishing our full stack web applications under the guidance of our mentors and according to our own thoughts and desires. Improvements became less earth-shattering and more incremental. Adding one feature at a time to make a more whole application. This is a great time to expand beyond the baseline and explore the aspects of the project you find most interesting.
+
+## Presentations and Workshops
+
+Throughout our training we had presentations and workshops with the developers and senior developers on a range of topics like Git, Agile, Java language features, and software testing. We also started the grad code series – a fun opportunity for each of us to give our own presentations. Each week has a topic and a four or five of us presented on a subtopic. Some of the topics were very broad, each subtopic covering a different programming paradigm, others were narrower and we found we were struggling not to cover the same things in each of the week’s talks. I know it’s common to have nerves about giving talks or presentations, but these are very informal and really just an opportunity to create a discussion. If you are learning and the others in your group are learning, then everyone is doing great!
+
+To cap off the training programme we did some work in the cloud. For us this was a run through with the AWS cloud offering, getting used to what’s available and how to use it. We set up an example web app and did some Infrastructure as Code with Terraform. It was a nice conclusion to the training that we had been doing over the previous ten weeks. We still have our open source training and design patterns to look forward to but these will happen concurrently with the graduate project we have just begun.
+
+## Final Thoughts
+
+Looking back the time seems to have gone by at lightning speed. Each week we’ve made noticeable improvements on the previous. The contact with mentors helped us improve day by day and our Graduate Coordinator and Training Officer worked hard to keep us on a steady course.
+
+So that’s my summary of the Scott Logic Graduate Training. It was a great time for me, I met loads of people who have similar interests to me, who know loads, and who want to see me grow. I would tell you that my most important piece of advice is to have fun but that’s trite and overused. Instead, I’ll ask that when you are going through your training you spend some time considering what advice would have been most helpful to you, so you might give it to those who follow in your footsteps.

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