From Bootcamp to the Trenches

Dan Schoonmaker — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 23:25:57 +0000

Hello! We’re the Living Security engineering team. A (currently) small group of engineers, within a startup company of around 20. We’re all working hard to build a world-class Cybersecurity Awareness training platform for enterprises.

We started this blog to share our daily victories and struggles with the world. Our hope is that as we continue to grow, sharing our experiences can help others learn and grow as well.

Today’s blog post is an interview with our newest hire, Gideon Ibemere, Jr.. Gideon recently graduated from a coding bootcamp, and with this becoming more and more common these days, we thought others may find his story informative.

Dan: Hey man, I’m glad we finally have a chance to sit down and do this, how’s it going?
Gideon: I’m living the dream, no complaints, man. Definitely looking forward to sharing my experience as a bootcamp grad and hope it provides some sort of guidance to others in a similar situation.

D: Yea, so let’s start off by having you tell the world a little about yourself.
G: So yeah, my name is Gideon Ibemere Jr., I moved up to Austin to join the Living Security engineering team just over a month ago. Before that I was at General Assembly’s Software Engineering Immersive bootcamp. So from April 2019 till July 2019 I would park my car on the East side and scooter down to 6th and Congress where I spent about nine hours a day, 5 days week working on code.

D: Damn, that's a legit bootcamp. What led you to pursue a coding bootcamp to begin with?
G: I’d been working on a remote agency with some friends and I’ve always been entrepreneurial, but execution made things slow down or come to a complete stop--execution as in getting a production ready site or product for people to interact with. I just didn’t have the complete skillset to do that. Also, the job I was working at was offering a stipend for furthering my education, so it all fell in line.

D: What sort of tech stack was taught there? Were there different tracks to choose from, or was it a pretty set curriculum?
G: Yeah, so, the curriculum for the GA bootcamps is created based on the demand in the area. So for my cohort, we had a “global” classroom with students from Austin, Dallas, San Francisco, and Los Angeles all learning the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, and Node) and also Django + PostgresQL.

D: You said April to July, so a 3 month bootcamp?
G: Spot on--something like a minimum of 500 hours in class, 12ish weeks.

D: Before that, did you have any software development experience?
G: More like web development--I studied Art at Austin College in Sherman, TX--long story short, one of my senior shows was based on the intersection of [my] real life and the internet. I used basic HTML, SASS, and JavaScript to recreate the old discovery page of Snapchat with videos from 30 or more concerts I’d been to over my college career. It’s somewhere on the internet if you wanna check it out.

D: Once you started interviewing, did you feel prepared entering the job market? Did you feel like you were lacking in any particular areas?
G: Technically, I definitely needed to continue practicing authentication with JWT and definitely SQL/Relational databases. Also, I’d say I realized how I could improve my interviewing skills after my fourth or fifth go at it. General Assembly has a career focused portion of the curriculum called outcomes. This was extremely helpful in preparing for the job search, but I wasn’t very good at following the curriculum--I think if I had taken better advantage of that I would have had even better results. All in all, the bootcamp gave me a really good toolset to build upon while also job searching.

D: Do you keep in touch with anyone from your cohort? How are they doing finding jobs?
G: This is a funny one--they jokingly gave me a superlative related to this: “Most likely to not talk to anyone after the cohort.” I mean, they weren’t exactly wrong, I kept up with some of them for about a month or two after. A few were interviewed during the final week(s) of the bootcamp, others had jobs within the first month post-grad. Thinking about my most recent inquiry, there are probably two or three that are still looking for full-time opportunities.

D: Ok, let’s shift over to after you were hired by Living Security, how’s your first month been? How have things compared to your expectations?
G: Candidly, it has been sick! I’ve gotten to work on some pretty cool stuff that required a few different approaches. As such, I’ve learned a lot more than I could have imagined.

D: How was the interview process here compared to others? Any feedback on our interview process?
G: The interview process was part of the reason I was eager to accept the offer. I really enjoyed the collaborative nature of the interview even though I did feel like I could have performed at a higher level. To that point, the openness you and Matt showed helped to quell most of my nervousness. There were some interviews that felt like they were made for me to fail, some that I had the gall to ask if the problem I was solving had a real product connection to the job. In those cases I was met with gatekeeper attitudes versus the collaborative attitude you’d expect from an engineering team. Hope that makes sense

D: Yea, for sure. Where were some of the other companies you interviewed for? Were you always interested in joining a small team?
G: I interviewed with Lightspeed Systems, Sock Club, AnswersNow and a few others. I actually don’t have a preference in terms of team size. I’ve had experiences with small teams and gigantic teams, so I was and still am open to either or.

D: What are things you're doing now on the job that you feel maybe bootcamp did not fully prepare you for?
G: DEVOPS for sure. Deploying code to services other than Heroku and understanding different build options--webpack vs rollup etc. Also design patterns in writing code. Matt (our head of engineering) recommended I use a factory pattern on a project and I was like a kid in a candy shop when I read up on what it was.

D: Now that you're on the other side, do you think what you learned at bootcamp could have been learned on your own for free (or nearly free), even though it would have taken more time?
G: I think I could have learned it on my own, but the structure and proven curriculum was a better catalyst than my own will.

D: So overall, it sounds like you’ve had a pretty positive experience. Do you think you would recommend a coding bootcamp to a friend?
G: I have done and would continue to do so--it’s a cheaper alternative to a CS degree and you are able to impact the workforce as close to immediately as you can be. While job searching, I was able to help friends and family with their businesses and personal projects as ‘real world’ experiences post bootcamp. I’m not sure if I’d have that skill set directly after graduating from CS school.

D: This has been awesome man, it’s been great having you on the team. Can’t wait to see how you continue to grow.
G: Thanks for taking the time to do this! I’m excited to grow as an engineer at Living Security!

Hello World

Dan Schoonmaker — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 15:08:16 +0000

The net economic value of creating another tech blog these days is near zero. That's my fear, anyway, as I set out on this journey.

Trust me. I don't want to just add to the noise. But there's something special about our team here at Living Security, and I would love to share that story.

Ghandi said, "whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it’s important that you do it anyway." Because even though it sometimes feels like everyone around us already knows the information that we know, that is definitely not the case. We all have valuable information within our heads that may seem trivial to us, but to someone who is just starting out, may be invaluable.

So here we are. A small startup engineering team, fueled by coffee and determination, helping to build a cybersecurity awareness ed-tech company that we hope can make a small dent in the universe.

As for myself, my name is Dan. I joined the Living Security team in July 2019 as our 2nd full-time developer, and the person tasked with making our offline, experiential-based training more digital. To understand what that means, allow me to explain what it is we do here.

Living Security was founded in 2017, by two of my close friends, Drew & Ashley Rose. They knew professional organizations needed to do something to improve their boring cybersecurity training programs, so they went out and created an escape room product that an enterprise could use to train their employees on the latest security awareness concepts, relative to their industry. Their hypothesis was that this form of immersive training was exactly what companies needed to reduce the greatest security threat to their organization - their employees.

Once the Living Security escape room product got off the ground, and began making a name for itself, it was time to develop a SaaS product for ongoing cybersecurity awareness training. That's when the first version of CyberEscape, our online training platform was born. Our CEO Ashley went out and found a consulting company here in Austin to help her build an initial MVP version. This allowed her to share her early vision with potential customers, investors, and most importantly, us! Her eventual engineering team 👾.

Today, just over a year later, our online training is used daily by employees from all over the world, at some of the largest companies on the Fortune 1000 list.

For me, the opportunity to work at an ed-tech company, focused on an industry as important as cybersecurity was really enticing. In previous roles I never really felt like the work I was doing was making a positive impact on the world. Here at Living Security on the other hand, it's refreshing to know that the people using our software are learning important skills that will help protect not only their employer's sensitive data, but their own personal data as well. And in today's world where our data is commonly over-shared, sometimes even without our consent, keeping our sensitive data secure is more important than ever.

I hope you find our journey as entertaining and informative as it will be for us living through it. We would love to get to know you, hear your feedback, and hopefully provide value to the worldwide developer community.

Until next time, stay secure!

Dan

DEV Community: Dan Schoonmaker

From Bootcamp to the Trenches

Hello World