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my cohort focused on Java development—we learnt the basics of Java 8 (which I now realise was probably a little outdated!)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
Top comments (1)
Such a crazy journey! Who knows what'll be your next direction