Beyond Your Limit, the striking topic of this year’s ZONIQ bootcamp. The first two weeks of August, our entire team came together in Kuala Lumpur to join forces during this crash course Mendix low-code development. There were many highs throughout these weeks; the team met for the first time in person, ZONIQ opened their office in Kuala Lumpur Damansara Heights, we had a professional video shoot, etc. Nevertheless, the intensive Mendix developer training done by our trainer David really challenged our team to push themselves out of their comfort zone: Beyond their limits.
Let’s start with the basics
Week 1, the team kicked of by learning the basics of Mendix with a challenging assignment provided by trainer David. The assignment was to create an online language learning platform from scratch using the Mendix platform. After getting on the same page with the user stories, it was time for the team to start building their app. What makes ZONIQ unique is that as a team, each junior developer is paired with a more senior developer so the level of education flows both their ways. The pairs all followed the same assignment and on the second day, David introduced them to creating frameworks with the design tool Figma. Using this tool, the developers could really use their creativity to come up with the first design of their apps.
The importance of quality
As the team went on with building their applications, our Mendix Expert Pieter stopped by to zoom in on the importance of quality in the development process. With his presentation on quality, Pieter put the emphasis on delivering a consistent, testable, reusable, secure and functional application that meets clients’ needs and is easy to comprehend. From his experience, a lot of times the quality of delivering as according to the latter is not the highest priority as the project comes closer to a deadline. ZONIQ however, finds quality one of the key points as it comes to presenting to the client with their IT solution.
By the end of week 1, the team was getting close to finish the online language platform they had created. It was now time to individually present their applications to the rest of the team and showcase what they learned to their peers. When working with clients, the skill of presenting the project in a way that it is understandable, which is incredibly valuable to ZONIQ.
Week 2: ZONIQ Club
With the first more technical assignment finished in week 1, the team moved on to a more real-life user case. As David introduced the team to their new assignment: ZONIQ Club, the non-developers of the ZONIQ team joined to fulfill the role of product owners. They were challenged to create an application to smoothen the ZONIQ HR and CRM process. The product owners were there to collaborate on the user-stories and requirements of the application’s use in the business. As the week progressed and the necessary discussions about how to design certain aspects of the application had taken place, the first demonstrations were given to the product owners. The developers showcased an application that had several functionalities. It includes an HR solution that will track the progress and manhours of each team member and automatically schedules assessment interviews throughout the year. ZONIQ Club can be used on mobile devices (as a native application), especially practical for the CRM part of the application. The CRM solution includes prospect/customer and sales cycle management with useful tools like sending direct emails with the click of a button. It is now up to the users to start using the app and start the finetuning process.
The design and rapid development of our application ZONIQ Club certainly showcased the motto of the bootcamp, the team went: Beyond Their Limit!