Ninja Space Content Blog

I graduated from a 26-week online coding bootcamp about 9 nine days ago and I'm going through a lot of intense mixed emotions.

There is a great relief having to pass such an intense educational program and also a lot of fear. I have fear of not being 'good' enough yet to get a first job, fear of rejection after an interview and the anxiety of the thought of going into an interview. Emotionally and technically, I feel like I am ill-prepared. Therefore, I'm going to do some analyzation here.

What are the job titles that I am aiming for? 
Having had years of professional marketing experience in the past, before I started the coding bootcamp, I figured in order to secure a new marketing job nowadays, I'm going to need to code because there are so many hybrid positions now where the coders are also the marketers. However, after finishing halfway through this program, my thinking was I really needed to strengthen my knowledge as a coder because there is still so much to learn and I think that if I went for a hybrid marketing/coding position, my growth as a developer could hinder. So then, I just wanted to focus on coding and coding well. So towards the last month of my coding bootcamp cohort, I was very adamant to myself and my school's career advisor that I wanted a junior web developer or junior software engineering position. Now after graduating from the coding bootcamp program and looking at more job descriptions online, I'm not so sure if I'll make the cut as a junior developer. My 'reacto', algorithm and data structure knowledge is weak. I think I'll need to spend months studying all that before I can even feel confident enough for the next phone interview. So now, that is my game plan along with working on creating a new project for my portfolio. I started a new file for it but I'm currently having GitHub issues which I'll blog in another post. Basically it is related to this error: "Basic authentication using a password to Git is deprecated and will soon no longer work." Read how I figured out my GitHub Two Factor Authentication to resolve this.

I had one phone call and zoom interview for a developer job a few days after I graduated and this is how it went.
I got very lucky and one of the program's advisors forwarded my resume a few days after I graduated to one of the BIG 6 companies and to a gentleman who has his own contracting business for web development. Honestly, I had no idea my awesome advisor was going to move this fast after I graduated and the gentleman called me the next day after receiving my resume! I was ill-prepared mentally. I honestly wanted to take a break after spending so much of my time away from my family because of the bootcamp but I knew that I needed to return this call back because I had an inkling that this gentleman is well known in the developer's community where I live at and I figured if I bombed the interview, I would still be able to learn from this first interview.

Well, after an hour of mustering the will to call him back, we talked on the the phone and he told me a bit about the contracting position and asked if I had the time later that evening to do a Zoom interview so he could go more into detail about the project and share a bit of code. So then at 6PM that very evening, I jumped on a Zoom call with him and he told me about the pay, more about the client, his background and asked a couple of technical questions. I think I did okay on the technical questions except for one. He uses the MVC model to organize his code and I had no idea what he was talking about. My tech knowledge includes: express, pSQL react, node, jQuery and git for the last 6 months and evidently, I am still such a noob!

That really made me nervous. He also said our first deadline for some deliverables was going to be 3 weeks away and with the holidays and my kids being on winter break, I didn't think I was going to be able to meet his expectations. I was really honest about my low confidence on that. I think he appreciated my honestly and he also suggested that I work on my confidence in these interviews, which I know is going to be an ongoing problem until I have a few more solo projects post-school under my belt. All in all, even though my first interview wasn't a job success for me, I still felt like I learned so much from him. I wish I had the confidence to take the contracting job since it's especially important for my resume to get professional experience now but my gut just knew, I would suffer and I didn't want to falsely say that I'd want the job when I knew I wasn't the right person for it.

Well, now I'm also nervous if that other organization is going to call me, I will bomb my only chance! I need to get working on improving my chances, like right now! I'm reviewing my old lectures today and making back-ups of my bootcamp project files onto a thumb drive, which is taking a long time because I have so many files. I have to do an operating system update on my MacBook Pro but I wanted to back up my files before I did that because I was told that many developers had issues with working on stuff after the recent update. Now that I am done with coding bootcamp, I figured I don't have any thing due soon so there is no better time than now to face more challenges with developing right? 

What am I going to do now and when do I think I'll find my first developer job?
I am looking over algorithm problems online, trying to learn Redux which I am about halfway through an online tutorial that's over an hour long and working on my first personal project post-bootcamp. I have a lot to do. I'll write another blog post in the near future to tell you my progress. I'm hoping I'll have better promise on a job search in March; about three months from now. Wish me luck!