Presenting

Tonight marks the official end to Codesmith's CS Prep program, a two-week bootcamp prep course meant to prepare the student specifically for Codesmith's program. It won't be an official class tonight, but we will be presenting our group projects we've worked on over the last couple days. As I talked about yesterday, there were some issues I had with my group, but after everything was finished, we had a working product. The project is nothing like what I envisioned or how I would have done it on my own, but it doesn't have any bugs and meets the requirements. I learned a lot about working in a team while doing this project, and I will definitely take that knowledge to my next job. The main hurdle with working in a team are the personality dynamics you end up having to deal with. There was one person on our team who took over the entire project and wouldn't yield to any sort of compromise. In their eyes, the project probably ended up being exactly like they wanted and perfect in every way. In fact, they even talked about putting it in their portfolio and showing it off to potential employers. I, on the other hand, don't even want my name on it and am embarrassed by the end result. I think I should have done a better job at expressing my displeasure from the outset, instead of going along with it to appease them, but the lesson is learned.

Back about 3 weeks ago, I had an initial phone screen interview with a company in Austin, Texas that was followed up by a coding test. I thought I did really well in the phone screen, but wasn't as impressed by my results in the coding test. I was able to complete the test and come up with a workable result, but the code was really ugly and not something I was really proud of. I didn't hear back from them, so I wrote it off. Then, they emailed me out of the blue late last week to set up an interview over Zoom for today. The interview, in my opinion, went really well. From what I understand, it's down to me and 3 other applicants out of an initial 60. We went over my portfolio and I explained several of the projects in my portfolio, what I liked about them, and what I had done to improve over past projects to make these better. Overall, I was really satisfied with my interview, and thought I did a great job presenting myself. I've learned to tell a compelling story of my journey in coding and how I got to where I am today, and I think it showed that I have a lot of passion for coding, in general. If I am selected through this interview, they are going to fly me out to Austin for a couple of days to meet the rest of the team, but I won't hear back from them for about a week and a half. I hate the waiting game, but it is what it is.

I've had a little time to work on Colt Steele and Stephen Grider's The New Modern JavaScript Bootcamp in the last few days, and I'm closing in on finishing this course. I'm down to what I think is the final project, which spans about 10 hours of coursework to finish. We are building out a complete e-commerce site with a backend in NodeJS. I think it's going to be a great portfolio piece to create something like this without using a framework, and I'm hoping it turns out as good as I think it will. Overall, this course has been a really worthwhile experience, and I will be recommending it to other developers when asked what to study. I get people who ask me in private messages on Twitter quite often what the good resources are, and I think I have a pretty well-formed opinion on this. I've taken a really wide array of courses, on Frontend Masters, Udemy, FreeCodeCamp, Codecademy, and the Odin Project, and I have a lot of information to offer. When I land a job, my goal is to give back to the community by mentoring whenever possible. I've documented every single day for the last 5 months and some change, so other developers would have a really easy time of seeing what worked for me and what didn't. If I can help other people break into this industry and have an easier time than I did, that would be great.

Until tomorrow!