In my next, I might write about what I think makes a good portfolio project □️.Flappybird.io traffic volume is 2,388 unique daily visitors and their 2,866 pageviews. In my last post, I spoke about what my day-to-day life is like at this office. I've been studying and coding ever since. I was surprised that my last-minute reviewing of HTTP status codes paid off - that part felt a bit surreal. She laughed, hopeful but cautiously optimistic. I walked out grinning and called my fianceé and told her that this one, this one was different. The interview that I ended up passing (for the job that I came home from earlier today) felt like every other one. Each one felt perfect until the email finally came. I walked out of each one thinking: that was the one. There are some interviews that you just can't pass. Which was the wrong way to think about it at the time. After all this time, I finally got to speak to real people about my programming passions! I had been couped up in my room for so long that I probably came across as over-excited. The timed algorithm tests caught me sweating too. Chipping away at the rockface of documentation. I stayed up late working on coding tests. I spoke to hiring managers as I paced around my room and surprisingly passed all of them. I applied country-wide and had a ~10% response rate for phone interviews. Often, the things that I spoke about were brought up on the phone or in-person. If I didn't feel like what I was putting down was sincere then I started over. All open sourced.Ĭover letters seem to catch a bunch of flak online but I think most of my interviews were related to the personal paragraph or so that I wrote for each company. I ended up building a website analytics service, a low-latency pair-programming solution, and a website for enabling game jam developers' to track user highscores. They were all full stack and unit tested, they had databases attached and were hosted on real servers at real hostnames - I wanted all the trimmings. Each one aimed to solve a problem that I or someone else in my community was facing. I stepped away from the safety of my fun apps and curriculums and I built three portfolio projects. But applying for jobs? Interviewing? Failure is part of the process. If you study hard, you usually get good grades, if you keep trying to build toy projects and don't give up then you will usually succeed. Everything I had done up to this point was without risk. The module choices were flexible but still forced us to learn the fundamentals like algorithms and data structures, databases, and practical software development.īefore long, I had to start thinking about applying for jobs. A year-long intensive course was exactly what I needed to support everything I was learning from building my own applications. Small programs, CLI programs, goofy games, silly bots.Īny fears that I had about the online delivery of my course were soothed by the active Discord chatrooms that the students maintained and the rapid pace at which professors would reply to questions - as well as the interactive live-streamed lectures. This whole journey was possible with one rule: make things. Alongside this, I was also entering game jams and creating small games in Unity with C#. I knew that I would be choosing any optional web-related modules so I completed most of freeCodeCamp as well. The first modules were in Java so over the summer I prepared by completing both parts of the popular Java MOOC Object-Oriented programming with Java. I respected the institution and the alumni buzz grabbed my attention. I applied to many but ended up choosing a distance-learning MSc. Often times I found myself researching concepts in order to learn other concepts in order to go back to the lecture notes! If these courses sound intense - maybe even scary - it's because they are. These courses really push you and many institutions have 'suggested' learnings for before term starts. These are full Masters programmes that aim to bring passionate students up to the level of a bachelors graduate and beyond, including a heavy thesis. I read an article about a conversion Masters in Computer Science. I had been working with some web technologies throughout my time at university but it was small potatoes compared to where I wanted to go, to where I am now. I was waiting for the results from my Creative Writing degree to come in. I delved away from the instructions and tinkered where I could but it didn't feel like I was actually creating anything, only copying. Brute force learning about functions, types, and classes. Video game tutorials seemed pretty accessible so I kept that up for a few weeks.
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