DEV Community: Carl Summers

Climbing the steep developer mountain - and my journey to get there

Carl Summers — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 01:52:59 +0000

I always felt uncomfortable with writing about my journey and the current progress I have made so far, but I think the time has come to talk about it. Here goes! 💪

Photo by Hello Lightbulb on Unsplash

2016-2017
I came back from teaching English overseas and was at a crossroads of what I wanted to do. I had some time and found RPG Maker online, and decided to pick it up.

At the same time, I was looking into learning how to program so I signed up for a certificate of Software Development at a local university, and a Teaching English as a Second Language certificate at another university. One course in Software Development was way harder and more time consuming than the three courses I was taking for TESL, so I put the courses on hold until 2017 when I was done the TESL certificate.

While doing the TESL certificate, I was experimenting with game development in Unity and attended game nights to try out other people's projects and learn about the world of game development.

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

2017-2020
The TESL course ended, and I got a summer job teaching international students English at a summer camp. The job itself didn't pan out as I wanted it to, with even students telling me I should consider a career in IT or development.

I resumed the Software Development certificate and it was extremely challenging for me, as I did not have a strong problem solving abilities or strong math skills prior to taking it. However, my drive to learn along with classmates encouraging me to continue did help me to progress. I also joined a university club because I thought being around smart computer people would help me improve my understanding of computer science and help my drive for completing the certificate.

During this time, I learned a lot about general topics such as networking, mobile app development, data structures, etc. I even participated in hackathons and game jams; we won third place in one hackathon and won first prize in another along with a team of individuals I met the same day, and second place in the first ever game jam I participated in.

In 2018, I had a job as a QA tester for video games which was an eye opener for learning the game development scene. It was a great experience and met a lot of people, but I realized through the process that the game development field was not for me, so I got my first job as a web developer at the start of 2019.

Unfortunately, that job lasted only a week. I didn't know what I was doing, and a bunch of other internal issues I faced did not prepare me for the task at hand which made me useless and essentially dead weight. I decided I needed some time to learn more.

Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

2020
On graduating from the certificate, I managed to get another job through a job fair I technically was not supposed to have access to because it was only for software engineering students. Somehow, I talked my way into being able to enter stating the vague participation requirements.

The job I got through the fair seemed great at first, but looking back I was not mentally prepared to work in an office setting just yet. The people were extremely smart and talented, and I felt like I was overcompensating my skills and felt severe imposter syndrome. I was bad at taking feedback because I felt I needed to know everything already so I was refusing the help. Also, it definitely did not help since the pandemic started and it was hard to ask for help in person.

Unfortunately, this job lasted only a month. It did taught me a lot of things: how I failed with communicating with a team and at sharing decision making, and how I lacked creative coding and designing from mockups. This prompted me to do a graphic design certificate at an old college I used to go to.

2020-2021
I learned a lot through this program that was not highlighted by the software development program I did; primarily communication, team work, and designing effectively. The communication and feedback was something other people noticed I had issues with and I was defensive at first, but as time went by, I felt it was much easier to collaborate and share the responsibility of a project/design.

Outside of general social skills for projects, I learned best practice for UI and UX, core design principles and different tools for creative projects.

Once this program was done, I was hunting for both graphic designer jobs and front end development positions. One friend suggested a company that was providing an internship for six months. However, the age cap was 30, and I was already 30 turning 31 the next week. Luckily, they sped the process up and I got the job.

Photo by Jose Losada on Unsplash

2021-2022
I just recently finished the internship but it was definitely a great learning experience; being thrown onto a project that had little to no documentation, no codebase, and a low-code solution that was broken almost all the time.

I managed to organize and complete about 70% of the project along with detailed documentation and flowchart (loosely based on UML) diagrams, instructions for the developer and regular users to use the internal tools. I collaborated with a UI/UX designer along with the customer support manager and CEO to conceptualize functionality and design of new features to be added.

Being the main person in charge of communicating with the customer support of the low-code platform, I often relayed information needed for other services being used under the same corporate umbrella, or helped with other internal projects using the same system.

What now?

I am currently self-studying and working on understanding concepts I'm unfamiliar with, while building a portfolio and job hunting. I can't wait for the next steps in my career as it's been one crazy journey so far, and looking forward to many, many more! 😃

If you're interested in seeing some of the work I've done so far after reading this post, feel free to check out my portfolio. Thanks for reading!

I'm building a resources list site for communities of colour in Montreal

Carl Summers — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 03:24:13 +0000

One thing I noticed growing up in Montreal, Canada is that we have tons of people from everywhere, but nobody knows what is available to them unless someone knows another person, who knows some guy down by the convenience store whose brother is a community worker. I decided I wanted to piece a list together of resources for communities of colour in Montreal into one site, where everyone can have access to what's available to them in their community, as well making it easily accessible to screen readers and people who need special devices to access the web. It's called 'Help Me POC'.

The project is using VuePress and has a documentation style format, allowing search either from the navbar or sidebar. I'm planning on getting a domain name for it. The project has been made open so people who are from Montreal who know about other community resources can easily add and make pull requests.

If you're from Montreal, Canada or from anywhere else and willing to contribute and support, here are the useful links to get started:

Help Me POC staging app

Help Me POC Github repo

Looking forward to seeing you help out!

A Noob's guide to Arduino (a.k.a. where do I start?)

Carl Summers — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 04:35:54 +0000

I'm still a student about to dive into the wonderful world of front-end web development. I was asked to join a hackathon because I also have a huge interest in AI and wanted to build something. Thinking that the idea wouldn't make the first round, I submitted the idea and stopped thinking about it.

One day, I checked my email and I received a message saying I made it to the second round. I was ecstatic! I messaged the teammate who helped with the idea so we can get started on the prototype. But once I realized the work to build the prototype was much more complicated, I began to have cold feet. I knew nothing about electrical engineering. I knew nothing about hardware or how to build an Internet of Things architecture. I didn't know the difference between an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi. I definitely had self-doubt.

After being confused by suggestions from a family member about drawing board schematics using components I had no idea how to work with or what they did, I began looking for online resources. This is what I came to understand so far.

Boards

For a board to do any simple automation with, an Arduino Uno or similar would do the trick. If you plan on connecting the project to the internet or controlled by a device such as a smartphone or a web application, you can look into board modules such as an ESP-12E or an ESP8266, which is a development board with a WIFI chip built in. I went with the latter choice because I want to be able to send sensor information to the cloud, but it can also act as a web server which is really cool. I mentioned modules above, and I'll talk about them more later.

Wiring

I also learned to understand how wiring works (more or less). You need to be able to know what kind of voltage is able to pass through those wires to avoid burning anything out. There's tons of looking at pinouts and schematics (images) of how things are laid out. Often times, you will be working with a breadboard, which is a workspace where you can lay out the wires and modules you will need in your architecture. Some breadboard contain special lines or grooves that can affect the circuit, so make sure to look into the one you want to buy.

Modules (Finally!!)

We heard of modules in front-end that can be used to make up a project like node modules, or components for UI that make up a client-side environment in React or Vue. In the case of IoT, from what I've seen so far, modules and components are interchangeable in term. They are simply parts of an architecture that does something. You can buy modules for WIFI, GSM cards for SMS messaging, sensor modules to do temperature, buzzers, voice recognition, etc. Each module corresponds only to what it does, and simply ties into the whole using resistors and wires.

Editors

The main editor used with Arduino is the Arduino IDE. I'm currently using that since it's the one mostly used in tutorials and recommended for beginners (like me :) ). I've seen videos where people use VSCode to code and upload sketches (code scripts are called sketches in Arduino terms) to their Arduino, but I prefer the Arduino's IDE library system and feel it's more suited for development.

The code you'll write is in C, so if you're not comfortable with this, there's tons of resources. The IDE gives tons of examples and code snippets to refer to. There's also an online Arduino IDE but has a pay wall if you want to connect generic boards or an ESP8266 to it other than simple Arduino boards.

Cloud Services

Once you build your architecture, you might want to store your information in the cloud. In that case, you have a few choices. The one I'm currently working with for the hackathon is Azure IoT Hub, but there are open source ones with low-end subscription models like Thingsboard.io or even Arduino's own IoTCloud (but you need to have a wifi-based Arduino such as a MAKR to use for free). These options allow you to push to the cloud and in real-time on certain platforms, if real-time data is important to you.

So far, that's it. This is a general overview but there are many more in-depth topics I found while dabbling in building something with Arduino. I will definitely want to learn more outside of my normal web-dev schedule. I'm sure there are people in the community who have more knowledge than I do, so please chime in if I am wrong about something, add your experiences with Arduino, or add any missing information that we all can use and learn from. Thanks for reading!