Post Graduation Entry #3

Wow, I've been away for a long time that I forgot for a while about this blog. My bad. Anyway, since my last entry I've been applying to dev jobs while working temp jobs to support myself. It was a roller coaster ride and I admit that some weeks I didn't follow up with anything and just distracted myself with the current work and my social life. Job hunting does get demoralizing and sometimes I didn't want to think about it.

Then came July when I caught my first break. Back in June one of the dojo's career counselors posted a job opening for a remote web developer position. I applied and a couple of weeks later I was speaking with the manager. We exchanged a few emails and a month later he offered me the position. It's part time, and remote, but it was my first break.

The main language and framework being used for this position is Ruby and Ruby on Rails. This was one of my strongest fields and so getting started was really easy. Most of my tasks involve front-end development and the implementation of API's for converting databases into PDF's. When the manager first gave me these conditions I panicked for a moment before tackling and I found that I quickly adapted to learning new materials. I guess that's one of the benefits of learning three stacks.

So that's my current dev job. Since it's part time I take other temp jobs to fill up my schedule and increase my income. Most of my temp jobs involve data entry and they do get really boring, even when the pay goes above what I usually get. I get excited when the job is over so I can head over to a Starbucks and spend a few hours writing code while drinking an Americano (traffic gets really heavy and I can't concentrate at home). It's not ideal; I'd much rather be in an office setting and coding full time but my dad often reminds me that I'm still starting off and I have my entire life to progress to my dream job. I try to keep that in mind when the days end.

So yeah, that's my first dev job. I said that I'd keep writing entries until that finally happens but when I wrote that I was thinking that it would be full time. So it feels like this blog is not yet complete. Maybe I should't conclude it just yet until the next opportunity comes up. I'll keep you posted.

Post Graduation Entry #2

I spent the first two weeks of the new year on the road. I've been wanting to check out the Pacific Northwest for a long time and I thought about getting this new year started with a trip. After that finished I returned home and went full mode on the job search. I also got another temp job to keep an income while looking for something permanent. I posted my resume on Dice and Indeed and applied for jobs through there. For most of January that was my job hunting strategy but it didn't pan out so well as I usually got silence but whenever a recruiter did contact me it was to tell me that I lack experience and therefore am not a suitable candidate for consideration. I try to explain that this bootcamp and my projects can show them that I more than make up for in experience but that didn't matter as much as years I have under my belt as a developer. 

I spoke to a Dojo friend who found a job in the last month of the previous year about my approach and he admitted that job boards like Dice and Indeed charge recruiters to post jobs on their site, meaning recruiters will want to get their money's worth and find a candidate who is at least mid-level. His advice was to keep my resume on those sites and perhaps I'll get a couple of responses but in the meantime look for jobs through other means. He recommended Angel List, since there is no middleman agency and most resumes and inquiries go straight to the hiring managers and company founders. He also suggested that I subscribe to Coding Dojo's job boards for their Seattle and Bay Area branches. 

So I changed my strategy. The number of applications I submit each day went down significantly but I was getting a few more responses for interviews. Since then I've had maybe half a dozen phone interviews. They seemed to go well but I'd end up getting rejections in the end. The market is competitive and it may not seem like it at the moment but the recruiter is also speaking to other people who are way more qualified than me. 

Most of my classmates are in the same predicament as I am. At least two got jobs straight out of the Dojo; one went back to his old job; one is working remotely; one has moved away to escape the expensive cost of living; I heard another one has given up entirely and will be taking a sales position; another one is doing a startup; and two went back to college with one of them getting an internship not related to development. The rest are still on the search. 

I speak to VT every now and then. Before he left he said that he was going to work on projects and algorithms until January before starting the job hunt. Since January whenever we do talk he's usually vague on his end. I don't know if he's going through the same struggles as all of us are. 

One of my instructors left the Dojo in January to become a freelancer and asked me if I wanted to help him out as a volunteer for a startup he's working for. I agreed to; good experience opportunity and it was a chance to learn more about Rails, which I neglected to back in that stack. 

I got a few calls from recruiters and they managed to set me up with a couple of interviews. Most of them didn't pan out either but one of them did offer me a position as a developer in the east coast. My initial reaction was to say no but after speaking with my family I realized that I shouldn't be picky. They cite my desire to travel and the harshness of the currently job market that requires me to have experience. I admit that this position is tempting for all those reasons they said but I am uncomfortable of leaving the Bay Area for a couple of years. I haven't spent too much time in the east coast and am not sure what might happen over there. But then again I have spent most of twenties in the west coast and not much as happened since I finished college. So I won't say no but I won't say yes just yet, fortunately I have a small window to consider this further. 

It's tough and trying. There are a lot of jobs here but way more qualified people competing for it. A nice college degree and a coding bootcamp can give you a leg up in this market but you also have to be a little creative, whatever that might mean to you. 

Post Graduation Entry #1

A lot of time has passed by that I feel like I should give some updates on life since graduating from Coding Dojo.

The week after graduation I got a call from the temp agency I use to work for and spent the next month working as a data entry clerk in Gilroy and San Jose. It was great to be back to work and taking a break from all those lines of code but I knew that I still needed to attend residency and work on the job hunt so I spoke to the instructors about delaying residency until the next month, in December, and they were fine. I still came in from time to time to use the office space to get some work done. I also joined a gym to get back in shape after three months of sitting in front of computer screens and stuffing myself with protein bars.

December came around, I finished my temp work, and I was back in the Dojo. For residency the instructor wanted me to work on at least three projects since that amount of work will often gain students notice for jobs. After much thought I thought about doing the following:

1. Treedentity - In the Fall of 2014 I took a class in college that was centered around applying technology for the community. The team I was with was tasked with designing a tree-leaf identification site for a middle school in Cupertino. I was the main developer for this project and without any knowledge of frameworks and libraries much of the code was written in manually, resulting in a rigid site with content that didn't change with the device it was being seen in. After this bootcamp I went back to the code, cleaned it up a lot, applied Bootstrap and the MEAN stack to make it into a single-page application that was more fluid and changed depending on the device it was seen in. Final code is on GitHub. 
2. Paper Crane Translations - Do you remember my German friend starting up his own business and asking me to design the website for it? Since the site was very simple and didn't require any back-end I figured it would be easier to do the entire site as a single-page application, henceforth used the MEAN stack. My German friend wasn't always available to give me his inputs so I used my spare time to create the logo and background images for the site. By the time he finally got back to me and gave me his inputs the site was ready for deployment. Today you can find it under www.papercranetranslations.com. 
3. Graffiti - My first two projects were easy and was not the best use of everything I learned at the Dojo. The instructor reminded me of that and encouraged me to pursue a more challenging project. The main bulk of Coding Dojo's curriculum focused on CRUD designs (create, read, update, destroy). Sites that allow users to make posts, update them, show them off to other users, and delete them if necessary are CRUD sites. Think about social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. So I decided to make my own social media site called Graffiti (you can write on the "wall" like graffiti) and using Ruby on Rails. I tried initially to do it on MEAN since I am very accustomed to it but after a week of solving one problem after another I realized that MEAN is not built for something of that magnitude. MEAN is centered around single-page sites and in social media sites often involve changing pages when users log in/out or visit static pages. After about two weeks of working on that project I deployed something basic. Check this out. It's not complete and there are a lot of bugs that I am unable to work out but I felt like a learned a lot more about Rails and how to implement complex designs. I also learned that it is important to work with others since sites like Facebook are so big and complicated that one developer cannot hope to understand every single detail on their own. 

Also, you might have noticed that I used the word "deploy". Up until residency I had no idea how to deploy sites after completing them. It wasn't until I got around to Graffiti that I was forced to figure that part out. It took a whole day to get it up online but once I did it became easy for Paper Crane Translations, which really pleased my German friend. I used Amazon Web Services for both cases and for the domain name I used Godaddy. 

I wish I could go into more detail about that and what else has happened since December but one of my college friends has asked me to help him out so I have to go and meet him. I have a lot more to say and perhaps it would be better to split this into two entries. 

Thanks for sticking around.