Unanswered Questions

With my first day as a Software Developer coming tomorrow, I'm having a full range of emotions. I'm excited to finally be starting this career and taking the first steps down this road. I'm nervous that I won't live up to expectations. I'm nervous about meeting the rest of the team, and I'm hoping that I will get along well with them. I'm hoping they will accept me as a valuable asset to their team and not see me as someone that is weighing them down. Then there are thoughts of what the future will hold. I wonder what I will be doing on a daily basis in the next 3 months, 6 months, year, and 5 years. It's really difficult to get a good feeling of what the day-to-day will be at this company until I've spent a few days there, but I'm sure my learning curve is going to be pretty steep in the coming months. After 3 months, I suspect my knowledge in the areas I'm working in will have grown dramatically, and maybe in 6 months I will be expanding my skillset even further. It's difficult to say if I will stay at this company past a year, but if something else comes up that is more lucrative, I wouldn't hesitate to take it. Most companies understand, once you have that initial experience and you've been trained by a company, your worth as a developer is much more significant than it is with no professional experience.

In 5 years, I hope I'm in a position as a senior developer, and maybe at a big name company, but that may take longer than 5 years. Eventually, I would love to be working at a company like Google, Microsoft, Twitter, or some household name like that. Either that, or a company like Gatsby, Apollo, or Github that provide tooling for the development community. To get to that level, though, the interview process becomes much more intimidating, either that or you luck out and meet the right people to get you in the door. If I want to get in that way, though, I need to be able to get to some conventions eventually, like React Conference in California, or any of the other big name conferences. Since I don't live in a city like San Francisco with a dense population of top-notch developers, I will have to do my networking through events like that, as well as through Twitter and LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, I'm up to about 2,500 connections, but I need to start focusing on making connections with people at these companies I want to work for. On Twitter, I've built my followers up to almost 1,600, but 100% of my tweets are about the #100DaysOfCode challenge, and I need to start using my voice on there to build up a reputation outside of that community. Now that I will be working in the industry, it's time to start looking in that direction.

In a lot of ways, though, today was a day like any other since I started this journey on May 26th of last year. I haven't gone a single day since the day I started this without putting in at least an hour of studying towards learning software development. I also haven't missed a day of writing this blog since July 16th, and I'm almost up to 200 days straight of posting on Twitter to #100DaysOfCode. Today, I worked on Andrew Mead's The Modern JavaScript Bootcamp on Udemy, like I have for the past 2 weeks. It's been a busy couple of weeks at my old job, and I've been completely drained of energy, so the progress on this course has been slow going. I worked on first finishing up the lessons on local storage, which I find fascinating, but have worked with countless times before. Then, we moved on to splitting up the code into separate files and creating functions out of some of the code to simplify the codebase a bit. After that, Andrew briefly discussed debugging in the browser console, which is my least favorite subject in all of development. Finally, we added some more complex DOM manipulation pieces into our todo app, like creating a checkbox and delete button for each todo element. Today was a good day to catch up on some rest and take stock of how far I've come and where I'm going, which I did take time to do. Tomorrow starts the next chapter in my life, and I'm sure I'll have plenty to say in the blog in the coming weeks.

Until tomorrow!