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
This is my first post ever, so thank you so much if read until the end. If anything I said resonated with you, if you enjoyed the post and got curious for next steps, please leave a comment and I will do my best to keep posting about what I'm doing and some progress.
Keep coding, keep learning!
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