It’s been…
- Several years since I first dreamed of writing script or code for a living
- 1 year since I left my unhappy video game designer job
- 6 months since I graduated from the Code Fellows Full Stack JavaScript Dev Accelerator
- 4 months since I started my full-time programmer job
What a trip! Thanks to Code Fellows in Seattle, I am super happy to report that I am now a full-time programmer and loving my new job!
I had tinkered with coding for years in my free time, but never in a substantial enough capacity to turn it into a full time job on my own. Code Fellows was that missing piece, and this is my post-Accelerator update!
My review of the Seattle-based Dev Accelerator can be found here, if you’re curious about the 8 week program itself.
Yes, I got a job after Code Fellows!
And it’s a great job! Like, an unbelievably great job where they pay me to solve interesting Angular and JavaScript problems! My title is Associate Software Development Engineer and I work at Expedia in Bellevue, WA.
So, yes, to all those wondering (and emailing me!), Code Fellows will work you hard, but it is sufficient training for an entry-level programming job (provided you do your part), and the skills you learn in the class will be useful in your job, even if your job is in a different language or technology stack.
Job search rocket fuel: The mid-accelerator resume blast
Code Fellows definitely made good on their promise to put student resumes in front of local employers. Halfway through the Accelerator (4 weeks in), Code Fellows collected and reviewed resumes from every student and fired them off to 40+ Seattle and Eastside employers. Holy wow – they knew about companies I’d have never found on my own.
The “blanket the city” approach worked, but I had a few small gripes that I think other students should be aware of.
- The resume blast went to companies I wasn’t interested in (…yet). I gave preference to companies closer to me on the Eastside (so I wouldn’t have to relocate), but my resume went to plenty of companies in downtown Seattle. I felt bad turning down these companies (burning bridges! ahh!), especially since I knew I would become more interested in relocation if my job search started to drag on.
- I prefer to customize my resume and cover letter to each position, emphasizing different aspects of my experiences for different positions.
- The blast went out too early. My final Accelerator project, my post-Accelerator project, and my portfolio website were not on that early version of my resume. Employers I talked to over the next couple months didn’t know about these things, and those projects and my portfolio site were the strongest showcases of my work.
Basically, I didn’t have iron-clad control over my job search in the first few weeks. And I like iron-clad control over my job searches.
I had only a vague sense of which companies I had already “applied” to and I inadvertently wasted the time of employers I probably wouldn’t have applied to on my own (because they were too far away or didn’t have the kind of workplace culture or benefits I was looking for).
But if that’s my biggest gripe, then I don’t have much to complain about. Code Fellows did a good job supporting its grads, and a quick glance at my fellow classmates’ LinkedIn profiles suggests more than half have already found full time gigs.
Really, I didn’t have to look hard for interesting job opportunities after graduating, and I still don’t – Code Fellows continues to send job leads to alumni, and my LinkedIn profile gets so much email I’m kind of afraid to look in that inbox.
The First Calls
The first couple weeks after my September 26th graduation were really quiet (which was good, the Accelerator was intense and having a little time “off” was beneficial) and then I started getting calls and emails from employers in late October and early November.
Most of these came from “resume blast” employers, but I also ended up in the hands of some recruiters trying to fill really short project positions (like, 3-week or 2-month contract projects). I thought these projects sounded exciting but all of these opportunities fell through for some reason or another.
A big question near the end of the Accelerator that many students asked was whether recruiters were worthwhile. I’ve personally never had a productive relationship with a recruiter in nearly ten years in tech, but someone must be getting value out of recruiters since they’re still in business.
For whatever it’s worth, the three companies I ultimately interviewed with contacted me directly, either via their technical director or their own hiring department, with no recruitment firm involved.
Technical Interviews
By mid-November I had phone interviews scheduled with three companies. Two of them had my info from Code Fellows, and one of them I had applied to on my own. Of those three companies I interviewed with, two chose to conduct the technical interview over the phone.
The first company had a setup where I shared a screen with my interviewer and coded in real-time as my interviewer watched and talked to me over the phone.
The second company conducted the technical interview as a series of questions, sans-computer, although my interviewer had poked through my Github repos and had some questions for me about code I had posted to Github.
The third company (where I now work!) brought me in for a one-hour in-person technical interview, which I really enjoyed and preferred over the phone interviews. This technical interview had the most in common with Code Fellows’s style of interview training, where the interviewer asked me questions and I wrote code on the whiteboard and answered questions as we went along.
In all three technical interviews with three different companies, I felt that my Code Fellows training and in-class interview practice had sufficiently prepared me for the questions I was asked. I was asked questions I didn’t know the answer to in all three interviews, but it wasn’t the end of the world. I just said I didn’t know, said what I would do to find out, then said that I would love to know, and in all cases, my interviewer explained whatever it was to me. (Yay, I learned something new!)
Technical Interviews: Questions I was asked
In no particular order, here are the kinds of questions I remember being asked:
- Write a function that determines if a string is a palindrome
- What does REST mean? Why is it important?
- Write a function that returns just the odd numbers from an array I pass into it
- Now modify that function to return every other odd number
- Describe dependency injection in Angular
- Tell me what kinds of tests you would write for that (whatever that was)
Keeping up after the Accelerator
I filled my post-Accelerator free time building a brand new AngularJS app of my own, a sort of “capstone project” that summarized my knowledge thus far. This project kept my skills fresh and I would recommend other Code Fellows grads do the same (after graduation, of course) to really solidify their understanding of the concepts likely to come up in interviews.
I brought this project with me to my interview on a laptop so I could show it to my interviewer, and that seemed to go over very well. (I got the job, after all!)
Other things I did to stay sharp after the Accelerator:
- Codewars “kata” – some of these were really hard but they’re also one of the only training things I’ve found that includes testing
- Updated my WordPress blogs’ themes and added customization I always wanted but never really understood how to do before (this stuff was easy after the Accelerator)
- Built my coding resume / portfolio site from scratch
- Aimed for a minimum of 1 meaningful Github push per day on whatever project of my choosing (I find streaks and those little green cubes very motivational)
- Read up on concepts I learned about in the Accelerator but wanted to understand better, like Big O, asynchronous Javascript, data structures
My first month on the job
Like many grads, my primary fear going into my first programming job was that I wasn’t sufficiently qualified. I still felt pretty green, despite all my experience. (Some people tell me this feeling of being inept despite accomplishments that prove otherwise may never fully go away, and recognizing that definitely helped.)
My first week on the job was spent learning the code base, the project structure, learning the workflow (how to run tests, how to get a build running), and setting up my work laptop.
There was so much to learn, and this project is so much more complex than anything I’d coded in before. (This is why I think building real, standalone apps / programs is best for learning to code once you’re past the online tutorial basics.)
Fortunately, everyone was happy to help and answer questions, and I quickly found several more Code Fellows alumni at the company who started before me or on the same day as me. We met up at a local Starbucks early on to share experiences, which was reassuring for everyone involved.
In that first month, my main contribution was adding a button that exposed a back-end feature the rest of the team had been working on for some time. I wrote the logic that determined when that button would be clickable, and added unit and end to end tests to help spot any future regressions.
I also had the opportunity to debug existing Ruby/Cucumber tests, learn a little bit of Scala, and write a few MySQL queries to look at how data was saved in the database. In that first month, I found that the biggest challenge wasn’t writing new code, it was understanding existing code and the complexities of the project’s structure.
The next 3 months
Around weeks 5-6 I started to feel like a more full-fledged, contributing member of the team. The vast majority of my work is in modifying existing code to perform a new function or to fix an unwanted behavior.
Here are just a few of the things I worked on in that time:
- Small optimizations to Cucumber test suite aimed at reducing the test code’s reliance on fragile XPaths and removing sleep() and wait() calls
- Improvements to the way dates are handled in the app, including adding the much-beloved moment.js library to the project
- Collaborating with another programmer to develop a date range “collision” algorithm that can check if a variety of date ranges overlap correctly (or incorrectly) according to a complex set of business rules
- Upgrade project’s Angular version and assist in the migration
- I had the opportunity to attend a day-long Test Driven Development workshop and bring those practices back to my daily work
My team’s leaders are big fans of pair programming (to the extent that we have dedicated 1pm-4pm “core pairing hours” every day), so a lot of the work I do is in the company of at least one other engineer. I’ve learned so many good techniques and habits from working with my teammates, and I can’t overstate how great this has been for my own development and quick integration with the team.
(I hope it’s apparent from my writing here how very happy I am to be working on this project with this team – I love it, it’s better than I ever dared to hope.)
Happy Ending / New Beginning
So that’s it! I can’t believe it’s been six months already. The Code Fellows Accelerator changed my life: my new role is challenging, and working at Expedia with my team has kept me just as inspired and excited as I was when I embarked on this journey a year ago.
