DEV Community: anne bertran ✨

state of the dev, april '23

anne bertran ✨ — Mon, 17 Apr 2023 16:07:02 +0000

So, here I am, a whole nine months after my first and only post. So much has happened! And I thought it was only fair to catch up and share my learning journey from then. This is Anne’s State of the Dev report, as of April 2023.

I finished my coding bootcamp in late October, 2022. I don’t know how well-known this is, but in the UK you can actually sign up for technology bootcamps for free! The Department for Education will fund the whole thing, as long as it’s your first time doing a course of this kind. Their Skills Bootcamps program covers a few different types of education, mostly fields where the demand for skilled professionals exceeds the supply. If you live in the United Kingdom, do check it out—it fully transformed my professional career.

This is how I found myself joining a Software Development bootcamp offered by QA Ltd. The first half of the bootcamp was an introduction to various types of skills we would need in the professional world, such as basic database skills, Python, Shell and Bash scripts, DevOps and Agile methodologies, networking, cloud computing, etc. I found this structure to be very helpful. It gave me the perspective I needed to then know how the specialised skills we worked on in the second half of the course would fit in the field of software development, and in the tech industry in general.

During the second half of the bootcamp, my cohort focused on Java development—we learnt the basics of Java 8 (which I now realise was probably a little outdated!) and Spring Boot. As my final project, I made a REST API that fetched playlist records from a user’s Spotify library and sorted them into databases. The project is still a work in progress, and my eventual goal is to make it into a tool that can sort songs by key. I have a general idea of what tools I’d like to use: the Essentia AI open-source library developed by the Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona's Music Technology Group, for example. However, I put that on hiatus and will pick it up again once I have a better idea of how to progress further. By the end of the bootcamp, I definitely felt like my knowledge of programming wasn’t yet on par with what I would need to code this project. Classic example of ideas running ahead of actual feasibility.

Still: doing this was a very important and useful experience. I learnt so much during the bootcamp and now, a few months down the road, I find myself using a lot of the skills I acquired. The course was so intense, and pretty much what most people describe in their accounts of doing a coding bootcamp: Sidney Buckner’s video on her experience starting a career in tech without a CS degree is particularly lovely, if you want to see another perspective.

This whole thing took me from August to mid-October of 2022. It was a time-consuming course, and even now that I am in full-time work, I don’t feel as exhausted by the workload as I did during my bootcamp. It felt almost as intense as my research masters, which was the last formal education experience I had before shifting into a tech career, and that’s saying a lot.

There was so much content to cover during the bootcamp, especially during our Java-centric second half. I barely had energy for anything else, but the one thing I did prioritise was applying to jobs alongside following our course content. I obviously had to first update my CV, and I’m planning on writing a post with some tips for that soon—but once my CV, my GitHub and my LinkedIn were more or less ready, I did not wait until the end of the bootcamp to start applying. Due to my constant exhaustion, I rarely applied for anything that did not have the “Easy Apply” button on LinkedIn, and I limited my search to job opportunities I found there. But even so, there were so many job offers that it was pretty much a nonstop side hustle. When people tell you that applying for jobs is like a full-time job in and of itself, believe them! 🙃

I was applying for so many jobs at a time, that a lot of them escaped my brain as soon as I woke up the following day. That’s exactly what happened with the company I work at now: I only remembered I had applied when the recruiter messaged me to invite me to a technical interview. By then I had not been offered interviews by many of the places I’d applied to, let alone a technical one. I remember being so scared, because most of the information about technical interviews one comes across online seemed to be about whiteboarding exercises and math problems, and I am Not Good with that. But actually, my technical interview was less of an exam and more of a conversation to gauge what I knew and what I didn’t yet. I was brave enough to admit that I didn’t have much knowledge about a good few of the topics they asked me about, and I think that was a good choice because it made me sound like I knew what my current capabilities were. It’s better to know what you don’t know than to not know what you don’t know and pretend that you do anyway, right? I felt like they valued my honesty, basically.

I then had a phone interview with the Head of Engineering, and later that day I was browsing books at one of my favourite bookshops in Barcelona when I got a call from an unknown UK number. They wanted to offer me the role as a Junior Software Engineer. I could not yell in the bookshop so I had to settle for whispering really fucking hard, guys. It was such a wild and exhilarating experience, not least for what it symbolised for me. There, among the multitudes of books that had been the main part of my academic and professional life up to that point, a door was opening to a new, unknown, exciting, environment.

For me, that moment represents the way I have tried to shape my professional activities since I finished graduate school. I want to discover new tools and new ways of creating, of realising projects. But I do not want to leave behind any of my past baggage, any of my artistic passions, or my experiences in the humanities. These days, I work in the engineering team of a game studio’s backend platform, but I’m not yet sure what I want to specialise in. Maybe it will be more gaming stuff, maybe not. I am interested in a lot of technology topics that don’t always fit into the requirements for my current job, like iOS development or digital humanities. What I do know, however, is that I eventually want to find a way to blend these two (apparently-unrelated) fields I’ve found space in, and I am patient, knowing a way to blend them will eventually become evident.

In the meantime, it is a pleasure and an honour to share my journey with you. You can expect more posts soon, and you can reach me at Twitter or LinkedIn anytime!

Talk later,

Anne

Hypotheses of a rookie dev 1: Late night confessions

anne bertran ✨ — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 19:47:32 +0000

Because I make sense of things best when I am writing about them, here is me writing about tech. Who would have known? (Photo by Jantine Doornbos on Unsplash)

Hi, I’m Anne!

Here are some ramblings about the kind of content you can expect from me here, how I became interested in tech, and other thoughts on development + coding. I wrote half of this by hand at about 1am in a spurt of creativity after I’d finished freeCodeCamp’s first HTML project, so I might sound a little crazy. What can I say, making a little website with cat facts is no small feat.

I'm someone who had never, ever thought a career in STEM would be within reach. Even when I made the leap to leave my hometown, Barcelona, to study and work part time in the UK, I went for a university degree in literature. I'd always thought of myself as "a humanities person" and thought I was "useless at numbers or science." But then I had the chance to talk to a tech recruiter, and throughout our chat I had this feeling that since he believed in my potential, maybe it wasn’t that outlandish to try tech-related things. It was a wild realisation—and my hope is to one day be the person to break boundaries and say to another humanities enthusiast, "yeah, I know it sounds impossible, but you can actually do it."

What I really like about programming is that it lets me exercise this need to be constantly learning, because it’s simply an essential aspect of the process. There’s comfort in knowing you will always have something new to learn because 1) this encourages collaboration in a way that is so different from the kind of academic research environment I am used to, and 2) it gives me a sort of relief—you know, that deep down, it’s absolutely okay to not know everything. And that it might even be a good thing!

You see, I mainly learnt-by-doing as a kid. The elementary school I went to, El Martinet, uses a very different pedagogical framework than most others (loosely based on the Montessori method); I will always feel privileged that I had the chance to grow up in such a community. When I was young, I worked through holistic interdisciplinary projects and I was constantly learning from my fellow classmates, but I gradually left that behind in favour of more and more abstraction: first in high school when prepping for the national exams, then in my undergraduate degree in English and Drama, and finally during my research-based Classics MPhil degree at Cambridge.

So it is reassuring to find a discipline where I can go back to tinkering in a very tangible way (I know it sounds paradoxical, but I promise you it makes sense in my mind.) In fact, I picked up coding in a more serious way around the same time I started to sew my own clothes (starting with my masters graduation dress!), and to me, they feel like very similar things. It would surprise you how meticulous and mathematical patternmaking can get! And viceversa, when I’m coding, I picture one of those big builds you can find at Lego stores. In the Barcelona Lego store there is a huge, ultra-heavy recreation of the Sagrada Família cathedral. It’s cool because this whole thing is nearly 4-5m tall and super intimidating, but then you get closer and realise that actually, it’s made of thousands of tiny bricks that look mostly the same and are equally easy to assemble. Casey from Pattern Scout, whose sewing YouTube channel is extremely informative, talks about sewing as something that is really accessible in the sense that even complicated designer pieces can be boiled down to row after row after row of stitching. Kinda like assembling a huge replica of the Sagrada Família out of little Lego bricks. Or coding. (Maybe both, if you’re playing around on Scratch.)

I feel like those of you with more experience in the tech world will probably be thinking just how delusional I am, and you know what? I trust your opinion and you’re probably right, I am simplifying and idealising things. It’s because I find it easier to understand things if I do that. So for now I will take a little idealism, because it’s helping me make sense of this whole universe I’m only starting to explore. And when the Lego bricks crash down on me and I realise the extent of my utopian delusions about open-source and data science and pretty frontend HTML, well. Hopefully you’ll follow along too.