My Lore
For my first blog post, I want to give you a glimpse into my journey. I’ve never been the best at writing, but this site is my way of stepping up my game and sharing the things I’m passionate about of find intriguing.
Dec 2019 - Jan 2020
Upon graduating from UNC Charlotte as a Business major (with no interships or clout) in December 2019, I really had no idea what I wanted to do.
At the time, I was working as a line cook at a local resturant, content with the idea of sticking to that for the benefits (no drug tests). I entertained the idea of going to a cheap culinary program down the street from my childhood home. Big dreams? /s.
A buddy of mine suggested that I should just do a coding bootcamp at UNC Charlotte because I could turn that into a decent paying job. Knowing I had an interest in field already since we both attended a local magnet school, albeit in different tracks, I decided to give it a shot.
My track had been “Computer Hardware”, where we were dabbled in networking basics and hardware intricacies, and we earned some CompTIA certs along the way.
Truth be told, our primary pursuit was to build a computer from scratch and then spend every waking minute trying to figure out how to bypass the school’s firewall in order to indulge in gaming sessions and have movie marathons on our school- allocated Chromebooks.
I redirected my savings that I earmarked for culinary school, signed up for coding bootcamp, facing a total cost of ~10K. My thought process was to invest now, and hopefully, secure a fulfilling career in software development down the line, ultimately recouping the investment.
Jan 2020 - Mid Apr 2020
The boot camp started and I was struggling. I never really worked hard at anything other than trying to be good at soccer. Looking back I had two main issues::
- Afraid to fail
- I didn’t know how to think deeply
Software Development is all about working from a state of failure. I was taking all these bugs or compiler errors as me being a poor programmer. If things didn’t come naturally to me I would shy away from it. I wouldn’t even really try or struggle since I was afraid of failing.
Towards the end when little sparks were flying and I was starting to get things to click I couldn’t think deeply enough to string more than a couple of thoughts together on harder problems. Solutions that weren’t right in my face seemed impossible to me and I couldn’t google to save my life. I finished the bootcamp feeling deflated and with COVID in full swing things were looking very dire for me.
Mid Apr 2020 - May 2020
There were about two weeks post-graduation of the boot camp was probably the lowest in my career and it hadn’t even started yet lol. I took this time to really reflect on what I wanted to do and what I needed to do to get there. Within that two-week period, I came to one realization that really saved me and jump-started my career.
Since graduation I have comparing myself to people with Comp Sci degrees, other people who graduated from previous boot camps, tech influencers, and kids who had been programming since they were 12 years old getting discouraged every time I looked at Twitter and Reddit until one day it really just hit me that.
Every developer is self taught
The more time I spent comparing myself to others or regretting my 4-year degree was time wasted on improving myself and making myself more marketable as a developer. During the boot camp, I expected someone else to teach me how to think and program but that’s a horrible way to learn. Struggling by myself in my parent’s house is where I made the greatest sides and where a lot of topics that were introduced to me via the bootcamp clicked.
May 2020 - Aug 2020
This period is where I solidified lots of topics that I was introduced to prior. Promises, higher-order, and first-class functions, TypeScript typings, React Hooks, how to focus, and most importantly, how to google and read documentation to figure things out on my own. I was also building crappy little one-off projects in Python. I built a finance calculator as a desktop app that calculated common finance items like; compound interest, Bond equivalent yield, and Sharpes ratio and called it PyFi. My girlfriend also needed a custom way to store her makeup inventory to keep track of what she had so I built the shittest Front end from 1990 and a Django backend with Postgresql for her completely on my own. I started to build confidence that I could learn on the fly and make things happen. In July of 2020, I started to apply for as many internships and low-level jobs that I could find online.
Aug 2020 - Feb 2021
I’ll admit that I got really lucky but after 30+ applications and some networking through my girlfriend’s parents, I landed a QA position at a startup out of Miami. I interned for a month at 600 bucks a week helping a team doing manual testing until September and then they made me full-time under the assumption I would automate the manual tests that I was doing. Using Java + Selenium I built a suite test around their main flows the main piece was their credit card flow so I automated using all the different Stripe test cards. I was also the lead QA on a ticketing system and I created an automated test suite around that. Being my first job I was honestly pretty timid. I didn’t stand up to anyone and the developers kinda walked all over me as they pushed their features out and some stuff was just blatantly wrong and not working because I was avoiding confrontation with them.
In October I moved in with my girlfriend and best friend in a house that we split rent 3 ways so $433 a month.
I learned a lot but being a QA and automation wasn’t really for me. I ended up leaving in February to work at Spectrum and attempt to go back to school @ NC State because I thought getting a master’s degree in Computer Science would help me stand out in a pool of applicants.
Feb 2021 - Mar 2021
Spectrum didn’t work out. I’m afraid of heights and in order to repair internet connections and hops at people’s houses we needed to get up on a HUGE ladder. For our first training session I froze and also dropped the ladder on myself and the next day I returned all the shit. Including the work van, boots, and all the supplies we were given because I knew it wasn’t for me. I was jobless again and didn’t know what to do.
Mar 2021 - Sept 2021
This period was a GRIND. I got a job working at Geek Squad at my local Best Buy and was also doing Instacart for like two weeks. I was taking classes @ NC State trying to get into their Master’s program in the meantime. Working part-time and going back to school over the summer was good practice in time management. It helped me get into a grove of continuously learning and to become disciplined in my learning instead of relying upon motivation. During this time I wasn’t really applying to any FT software developer jobs because I didn’t see anything that I thought I could get into.
I was looking for organizations that would take people to pay to train them and then help them get placed at a job as a contractor with hopes of FT employment if I performed well enough. I found an organization called SkillStorm that operated out of Jacksonville Florida and applied there received a call from a recruiter and set up a technical interview with one of their trainers for late August. I was grinding Data Structures and Algorithms for about 2 months as the first semester of classes was finishing up and sat for the interview and crushed it. They told me I made it into their training program and after Labor Day the class would begin to train and that I should ideally be placed in December of that year.
It dawned on me that I was doing another bootcamp except this time I was actually getting paid for it instead of the other way around. The organization didn’t require Computer Science or STEM degrees but I was one of the few people who didn’t have one and I was determined to work hard in order to stand out and get placed with a decent client.
Sept 2021 - Dec 2021
Our training cohort started and we got a really cool trainer, a lot of this was reviewed for me since I had taken and done something almost identical at the beginning of 2020 in my Trilogy Bootcamp. For salary transparency, we were getting paid 20$ an hour.
Here is how the setup of the training went:
- 9 - 1: We learned a new topic of the day and we started from ground 0 in JavaScript
- 1 - 2 lunch break
- 2 - ~3:30 we had a presentation about a technical topic that we got to choose and make a presentation on
- 3:30 - 5. We got to work on whatever we wanted; could have been a review of the morning session or time to work on your presentation.
Every so often we took a quiz or did a technical interview with our trainer to prepare us to talk about tech and land interviews.
I was buzzing during this time. I was getting some of the highest marks in the training sessions on the technical interviews and the presentations we very technical in nature and I was nailing the delivery. We had three projects with varying degrees of difficulty. The last project brought together several cohorts of different tech stacks altogether on a project. My team was tasked with a Google Maps integration to plot one delivery route within a thirty-mile radius in the most efficient manner. We had one week to ship and we finished in two days. So we moved on to help other teams and I worked with an Azure Service Bus for the first time which was cool. We ended up being the only team to fully finish their piece of the project which was cool to see and I made some friends. Overall a pleasant experience.
Toward the end of that final project, we were interviewing with different clients. I only ever took one interview with a Big 4 accounting firm and interviewed with a nice Solution Architect. The interview itself wasn’t too technical in nature a couple of interview questions about JavaScript, TypeScript, and Promises but most of it was focused on behavior-related items. Talking about what I’m interested in and what I would do in certain situations.
I landed what I thought was a two-year contract with the organization post Thanksgiving of that year and was going to start Dec 6th. I was over the moon. Finally was going to get my first job as a software developer and was going to prove to myself and everyone else that I could do the work.
Dec 2021 - Feb 2023
Boy, it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I had earned a reputation as a high performer and I was placed on a team with really no support. My first task was to get a legacy React and Angular component library into something called Bit.dev (Bit.cloud now) and I was working in tandem with a really talented group of developers. I was feeling completely isolated no one was available for me to reach out to. Feeling overwhelmed it started to bleed into my home life and I was honestly depressed, being a developer wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I didn’t like my manager. He was a micromanager and was constantly asking for updates every day calling on a whim and changing requirements. I was being spread really thin and I felt like I was getting nowhere. I ended up stopping the project in Feb of 2021 because the Angular support for the Bit.dev was having issues building the nested nature and within 6 months I was giving a presentation to the CTO… What in the world.
After that, I was moved to a different internal product with a small team and started working with someone who is still a close friend and coworker to this day. Since Feb 2022 I have been working consistently on the same project. Building all of the backends and handling the DBA role as well as helping another close friend and coworker with debugging DevOps and deployment-related issues.
Feb 2023 - Feb 2024
I couldn’t say what company I was working for during those dates. If I ever get around to linking my LinkedIn you’ll probably see who it was but in the meantime, I was moved from a contractor to a FT employee in Feb of 2023 after a year with a starting salary of 88K a year. I finally got my first FT dev job and was made an Associate Full Stack Developer. I don’t really do FullStack work anymore even tho that is my title. I’ve kinda taken the SA / Lead Role out of necessity to keep the project humming along but I’m getting really tired of working on the same thing. I’ve kinda built this project from the ground up with only 4 months of true help with a really great and competent lead from Feb 2023 - July 2023 before they cut the team down to bare bones and just had me and 2 other people running it doing absolutely everything.
That’s going to bring us to the present day. I’ve grown so much over this time and I’m skipping over lots of extra details about my life as I’m finishing this at 12 am.
This was just a massive dump of my journey so far mostly for me so I can look back on how far I’ve come. I plan to keep adding to the Lore category every February to update and create a time capsule of sorts about what I have been working on.
Thanks, Wuul.