CPD or: How I Learned to Stop Procrastinating and Code Minesweeper

At Harker, full-time staff are offered half a day each week (or time equivalent) for Continuous Professional Development (CPD). CPD is time where we can clock in and undertake projects that aren’t directly related to our work, but help us to gain skills and knowledge that is usually beyond our focus.

CPD time is incredibly useful in the wider tech industry, as the landscape is constantly being reshaped by new languages, frameworks, and solutions to problems that we’ve all gotten a little too comfortable with. Keeping up with these ideas is difficult, and learning them in depth takes a long time, but this is exactly the purpose of CPD - to give developers the take time to really dive into these concepts and get to grips with them.

My most successful CPD project began during a hack day back in November 2023 - a day-long team session where we got stuck into the newest component of our tech stack: Go (or Golang). This language was very new to all of us, and came with concepts and rules that gave way to more efficient methods of getting things done. It did come with a learning curve, too, but one we quickly surmounted.

On the hack day we were all asked to pick a project to undertake. The project needed to be something fairly simple and achievable in one day, but complex enough to learn the intricacies of Go. I picked Minesweeper - an iconic game created by Microsoft in the 90s. My aim was to build a server that worked with a database to fetch and store player data, which could then be implemented into a simple website.

It became apparent quite quickly that I’d bitten off more than I could chew, and after a brief discussion, we figured that this could be a good CPD project - I’d simply clock in under CPD and get on with the next stages of development.

It didn’t take long for a working implementation to be in place. My server was working exactly as planned, my code was idiomatic and obeyed the language’s conventions, and my knowledge of Go had significantly improved - since completing this task it has actually become my favourite language! I may have said some negative things about it back on the hack day, but through CPD I was able to learn the rules of Go and why they’re so essential - realising that actually, it’s a genius language.

Two months later, I revisited my Minesweeper server to add some new functionality: the website itself. This would require me to create a page with a form for a user to input their name, a table showing the fastest times of other players on the selected difficulty, and the real challenge: the actual Minesweeper playing field.

To fulfil this new scope I’d need to learn a new language and a new framework - Typescript and ReactJS. These were entirely new to me and required knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript - which I also didn’t have at the time.

That said, after a lot of frustrating iteration and many pages of documentation read, I’d completed my implementation and finally had a full-stack website. A user could head over and sign up, play a game of Minesweeper, and see how their time compares to other players. It’s quite simple, but this was a big achievement for me as I’d never worked on something end-to-end quite like this, and the fact that I’d completed an ambitious solo project and learned so much along the way was a huge sign of progress for my career in the tech industry.

I never could have achieved this without CPD hours, as the chance to work on a fully independent project and take it as slow as I need is a special opportunity - especially when I’m getting paid to do so!

Skills I picked up from completing this project are used almost daily, in both my personal and professional projects, where I’m now leading on frontend features! The fact that I can now look at and quickly understand code written in these languages and frameworks really reminds me of just how far I’ve come - from checking Stack Overflow every thirty seconds to a developer fully confident in my own ability.