First week of my commitment

Philip — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 00:36:00 +0000

So last week (and last post lol) I've decided to take a serious step and commit to try to study every day a little bit on the technologies I think I should be a master of.

Those are:

Ruby
Ruby on Rails
React

Obviously there's way more, but I wanted to take the first couple of steps focusing on these three technologies, because even though I know them, I'm no way near to be good at them.

Last week I created a sort of roadmap or topics in each one of these technologies that I need to know.

I've studied so far:

Ruby Blocks
RSpec (finished an entire course about it and practiced TDD)
Polymorphic Associations

I know that passive learning isn't the way to go, so I also implemented what I've learned in some projects.

I've used TDD to implement a small project of "migrating" your database schema from a Bubble.io app to a PostgreSQL database, and I'm proud to say it really helped me to implement and it was fun to build. You can look at the repo here.

I also revived another project to use polymorphic associations, and I will keep using this project to further my learning in Rails.

From a day-to-day perspective, I felt I was learning so slow and so little, but when I organize things to write this post I can see the progress and how much I've studied and I'm actually happy with how much I've studied this week. Hopefully I can keep this rhythm going.

If you found this post motivating or if you're also studying leave a comment down below or react to this post so we can motivate each other.

Keep coding, keep learning!

Stop lying to yourself and do something about it

Philip — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 01:27:34 +0000

Hello there 👋

My name is Philip, I'm a fullstack developer at a small startup and I've been coding for the past 2 years or so.

Actually, am I a dev? Have I been coding for the past months? 🤔

This post is a wake up call to myself and maybe other devs out there that may be in a similar situation as I am (hopefully not).

Career transition

To give you context, I'm a postgrad webdev bootcamp, and since I finished the bootcamp I was thrilled to start applying what I've learned to real world cases. In my job at the time they gave me the opportunity to do a career transition, moving from business development to product/web development and I was really happy about it, I was going to be mentored by a very experienced senior dev and learn a lot.

Everything seemed great

Then something happened inside the company, we had to move to a different project, but still ok because it was going to be the same structure. Or that's what I thought...

In reality, the senior dev got another job but still wanted to keep on the current job as well, so our code reviews and meetings became less and less frequent, more rushed. I kept saying to myself that if I kept coding I would still be learning tons. But to be honest, I was really lying to myself. Not only this new project/business wasn't appealing, it was more like a side-hustle to the senior dev, so it became really demotivating for me.

Something new?

I got really frustrated and felt that maybe I need to look for a new job. I got a new job at another startup, I was invited by a tech lead. He offered to mentor me and help in my journey to become a dev as we would transition a whole product from no-code to code, and again I was thrilled.

Some months passed by, and I can count with my hands how many lines of code I've written in this new job and I had to use a no-code tool to help the company with the current app. I was always told that in just a few weeks and you will start coding and surprise surprise, suddenly the tech lead left the company.👺

I got really sick of all this and started applying on jobs. And no surprise to myself, I felt unprepared as I've been months with no-code and not studying. I know this is all my fault, I'm the one that accepted this situation, I just feel really bad that all this time that I could've been studying and preparing for interviews I spent on no-code, not enjoying what I was doing.

Wake up

Please stop lying to yourself. Don't get comfortable waiting. Go do something about it.

Build a study plan
Commit to a schedule
Practice interview problems
Build projects
Read books
Schedule interviews

I've had enough, and I'm commited to study really hard and do all the things above to actually become a better developer, a true developer.

Just to give more context on my stack and what I'm going to be focusing my studies:

Ruby
Ruby on Rails
React