DEV Community: Cristien

Nevertheless, Cristien Coded in 2021, with self-compassion.

Cristien — Sun, 07 Mar 2021 22:29:02 +0000

My journey is not a linear path

My journey into tech has been a long winded process of finding myself and my own voice.

I graduated with a Pharmacology degree and worked as a Research Lab Scientist for 3 years. In those 3 years, I wanted to pursue PhD because I love research and data. I had a change of heart when I realised I didn’t want to spend the next 20 to 30 years going into the lab, putting on my white coat, experimenting both in vitro and in vivo. I wanted to be creative but yet utilise my love for problem solving and learning.

I left the field when I was diagnosed with endometriosis. The pain I experienced as a woman during ovulation and menstruation was unbearable. It took 3 years for that diagnosis, I spent those time in the lab and I think that was one of the deciding factors that I wanted to work in tech because there is a greater flexibility in working conditions, I could work with my laptop and tend to myself when I experience pain.

I joined a coding Bootcamp under apprenticeship - I went for an interview with a small BI company and I was really excited because I could possibly combine software engineering and data. I started the Bootcamp. I learnt a lot in 12 weeks but looking back, the learning style was a lot of ticking boxes and I wanted to go deeper into the subjects. I joined the company but I was the only developer with no outline of the projects I should be working on and was told to work on sales consultancy support. I was misled but I spent the whole time, hoping or wishing that there would be a project where I could utilise my skills but this never came. I quit after 2 and the half months for various reasons.

My first job in tech set me back and I was left questioning my ability and whether or not a hostile and unsupportive work environment is the norm in tech.

I passed my Microsoft exam, quit my job and found out I was expecting. That was a lot of emotions in less than a month - happiness, excitement, anxiousness, self-deprecation and a whole lot more.

I was anxious about the pregnancy and what my future in tech will be. Will I have a second chance at it? Will I be able to reboot my career in tech? Am I capable of being a software engineer? Will I be ok taking a career break?

Fast forward 20 months later

I spent my time during pregnancy dipping in and out playing around with Gatsby, coming up with project ideas that didn’t get executed and creating learning tracker and plans so I could use it after the birth of my baby.

I didn’t get to work on any projects or learning while I saw other new mums thriving in their learning with a young baby. I blamed myself for not being disciplined but the truth was, motherhood was not natural to me and I suffered with postpartum anxiety.

Now that my little one is 12 months old, I have learnt so much about motherhood and myself thus far - it taught me to be kind to myself.

I am now hopeful for my future with my family by my side, friends who lift me up and supportive communities.

My recent achievements look like this:

I found supportive moms-in-tech Slack group and Virtual Coffee community.
I created my blog to document my learning
It’s okay to have a multitude of interests from design, web dev, data and machine learning (I tend to talk myself down for not being able to narrow my interests to one thing)
I was recently awarded a Bank of America scholarship to study Python with Code First Girls and currently enrolled in the evening classes for a month
I have also accepted into Front End Foxes School - European region cohort 🦊
Allowing myself to take a break and rest
Speaking kindly to myself when I don’t achieve what I need to achieve

What I’ve learnt so far:

Sometimes you have to be put in challenging situations to be true to yourself and speak up about what you want.

Yes, I quit my first job in tech because I wasn’t going to let myself be treated unkindly.

Yes, I stopped coding for a bit because my family is my priority and fertility is not something I’m going to take for granted.

But I am back to code consistently and this time, with self-compassion and a sprinkle of self-belief that I can achieve my dream goal: to land a remote Software Engineering or Data Scientist role this year within an inclusive, supportive company who I can contribute my skills to.

I have grown so much as a woman and a developer who have struggled to find my voice. I am still work in progress but despite everything, nevertheless I coded.

Happy International Women’s Day!

How to keep a forked repo up to date - journal

Cristien — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 16:53:55 +0000

I am trying to familiarise myself with React Native to contribute more to Bekah's Postpartum Wellness open source project and have been in touch with Bekah for a walkthrough of the project so I can try and work on open issues. She let me know that she's made a small change to the repo and I might need to grab the latest copy.

So, I thought I could just pull latest copy from the master branch but as I went on my local copy and git checkout master- it says the master branch is up to date. I thought of course it is as it is a forked repo.

With the help of Google, I came across this gist

📌 What I did:

cd <local forked copy>
git remote add upstream <original repo link>
git fetch upstream
git pull upstream masterto update my local forked repo.

I think that worked!

So today I learned this 🙂

Contributing to an Open Source Project - journal

Cristien — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 02:43:31 +0000

Having been away from coding for almost 2 years, it feels good to be able to slowly come back to it and refresh what I have learned. It is a slow progress but one of the things I would like to do more this year is Open Source contribution.

I would like to one day make a PR for an issue that requires me to submit my code but any contribution, however small, allows me to refresh and relearn the process of using Github and git.

I came across Bekah's Postpartum Wellness App through her journey on Twitter as I have been following her for awhile and Virtual Coffee. As a new mum to my soon-to-be 12-month-old baby boy, this hits close to home as I suffered from Postpartum Anxiety. I think her passion project can be useful to a lot of mums.

So I reached out to her to ask about how I can contribute. I have very little knowledge about React Native - I know it's a framework to build a mobile app using React. I know a bit of React and I always wanted to learn React Native. It's been on my to-learn list since last year when I had an idea about a mobile app that I wanted to build which I never really executed because a newborn baby was on the way.

Bekah was up to walk me through things so we are scheduling something for that. In the meantime, I wanted to take a look at the repo, read through the README and check out the issues. While reading the README.md file, I clicked on the contributing link but it redirected me to a 404 error page. So I thought, maybe this is something I can fix.

I have forgotten all the steps on what to do with git and Github! One thing I didn't want to do was mess the whole repo structure. So I did everything very cautiously.

📌 What I did:

Fork the repo. What this does is it makes a copy of the repo to our own repo.
Clone the repo in desired local folder. git clone <repo link>
Open the repo folder in Visual Studio Code.
Checked out the files and made sure to install any dependencies => I realized Bekah uses Yarn in her project, which I have never installed and used so I installed Yarn.

To make changes to the README.md file, you want to work on a new branch rather than the master branch.

📌 So this is what I did:

Create a new branch git branch <name of new branch>
Go to the new branch git checkout <name of new branch>
Make changes to the file.
Add changes via git add .
Commit changes via git commit -m <commit message of changes you made>
Push changes via git push origin <name of new branch>
Open a Pull Request.
Now we wait patiently for the OS maintaner to review it and give us feedback.

So that was my first pull request of the year! HURRAY 🎉

This whole process allowed me to refresh git and Github. Now onto understanding React Native 🙂

Here are some resources I found useful:
-Your first open source contribution: a step-by-step technical guide
-Git Cheatsheet

Credits:
Cover Image by Richy Great on Unsplash

What is Microsoft 70-480 exam and how to study for it?

Cristien — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 15:48:49 +0000

Microsoft has so many certifications that could allow you to level up your technical skills!

And today, I did my very first certification exam and I passed! So, I'll share a bit of knowledge of what the exam is and a quick guide on how to study for it (&& pass it!).

So, what is Microsoft Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 anyways?

I have never heard of this exam until 3 months ago when I was about to complete the coding bootcamp I attended.

When you look at it at a glance, the exam seems like it's testing you on your knowledge of how to build a website but there is more to it!

Check out the exam certification page to find in-depth explanations of what the exam is. In summary, there are 4 things they want you to have a good understanding of and pretty much sums up what goes into the exam:

Implement and manipulate document structures and objects (24%)
Implement program flow (25%)
Access and secure data (26%)
Use CSS3 in applications (25%)

So why take this exam?

I feel that it helped me tie together what I have learned during my bootcamp. I have always enjoyed CSS more than JS because I am more of a design person but this exam has helped me appreciate JS a lot more!

Was it difficult?

I suppose if you have been programming for years and have good fundamentals - it wouldn't be too hard. But it was really difficult for me. With only 6 months of JS under my belt, I had lots of gaps in my knowledge but it definitely pushed me to learn, question, read and understand more, repetitively. It helped me find my style of learning too!

What do you need to learn to prep for the exam?

The honest answer is there is quite a lot of things that are covered in the exam but basically:

HTML, CSS3, JavaScript (ES5)
Callbacks
Error handling
Events handling
Data validation (hint: regex regex regex)
HTML5 Web Apis: DOM, web workers, web sockets, geolocation, app cache, localStorage, sessionStorage, canvas, svg
XMLHttpRequest and Ajax
jQuery
Basic CSS Layout, Flexbox, Grid, CSS Regions
Transitions, Transforms and Animations
...(I might have missed a few other things, but let me know if I have!)

How to study for it?

💡 Find your learning style preference

I think everyone has their own way of learning so essentially, it may be best to find out what your learning style preference is - is it watching videos, reading a book, doing practice questions or a combination of all of them?

As I am a visual, a verbal and a reflective learner, I used a combination of learning styles to prep for the exam!

📚 Get the learning materials suited to your style of learning

The main material I used to prep for them exam is the Exam Reference book for 70-480. I read the whole book! As you go through the book, you'll find that the book has a few errors or some outdated materials as it was published in 2014, but I complimented my reading with online materials like MDN, W3Schools, Stack Overflow, freeCodecamp, Medium articles on concepts that I struggle to understand... technically, I google the heck of everything!

💻 Question everything and take notes

Another thing that I think helped me so much in my learning is taking notes of all the questions I have and use the notes to reiterate my understanding! So, I use Google Keep to take all my notes - for instance, I wasn't happy with my understanding of localStorage and sessionStorage so I would keep the questions I have in Google Keep:

"What is localStorage?"
"Why use localStorage instead of sessionStorage" and
"What does 'localStorage and sessionStorage is specific to the protocol of the page' mean?".

The last question was referring to a sentence in the book because I really did not understand what it meant... when you don't know something, it's always your best bet to question it and find the answers!

Then I'd find the time to sit down and google all my questions, read different online resources to really get to the bottom of my questions! I would save the online resources as source to the answer and answer my own question in a few sentences.

👩🏻‍💻 Practice the questions

I had some printed mockup questions, ones I find online plus I signed up to measureup to get the feel of the exam in real-time.

🙋🏻‍♀️ Ask other devs

As I went through practice questions, when I get stuck understanding the explanation behind the correct answer - I would ask other devs and just ask how, why, what...

💪🏻 Don't give up!

Really, this is the best piece of advice I could give you - if you are new to coding, revising for the exam might feel overwhelming but do not give up.

How to pass it?

I will be lying if I said I didn't get shocked when I found out I passed. I was expecting to fail the exams because I felt like I wasn't ready or did not know enough.

But the truth is, you will never feel ready, there will always be something that you don't know and in real-life, when you are coding and building something - you would google things you don't know...

At the end of the day, I think the whole point of studying for the exam and the exam itself is to give yourself a good understanding and strong fundamentals to HTML, CSS and JS.

If you study the materials and do a bit of practice questions, plus really learn to understand the concepts - you'll do great!

The most important thing is understanding the concept && if you still don't get it, it's okay - keep at it because you eventually will 🙂

What’s next after the exam?

You can take more exams on the Microsoft certified path... but for me, learn new things, build something and more things and keep learning.

Thanks for reading ❣️
Good luck - you got this ⚡️

Here are other resources you might find helpful to prep for your exam: