Zero to Hero : How I got hired 3 months after writing my first line of code.

Jaice de Celis — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 17:25:58 +0000

Hi, my name is Jaice, I am a 22 year old kid living in Central NJ. I live with my fiance and my 18 month old daughter along with my fiances extended family. My fiance nannies for their two children because COVID has kept them out of school.

Before COVID-19 hit the world and things changed, I used to be a traveling salesman and I was in the process of starting a company that I was hoping would drastically change the quality of life my family has come to know. I made decent money but we had terrible financial habits. When we decided to bunker down and quarantine, our savings dwindled quickly and we knew that something had to change.

We both brainstormed for hours, thinking of ideas and things that we could do in order to pay for things like our cell phone bill, our daughters diapers, etc. The list of things in our shared document almost baffles me when I look at it today, we were really reaching a few times.

Long story short, after talking about a few different ideas, we settled on something we thought would work. Development.

Now I know it sounds crazy, development isn't a get rich quick scheme by any means, but I was confident that I could get it done because I had been sold the idea by a coding boot camp, Lambda school. Silly me for falling for a trap, but fortunately I chose a cheaper and in my opinion higher quality route and I went with Thinkful.

I won't talk much about Thinkful here because this isn't a school review, but for those of you who would like to know about my experience, feel free to DM me!

After enrolling in their flex program on money that I had borrowed from everyone around me I started applying for jobs. I figured what the heck, if someone responds, so be it, I can get experience and learn what it is like interviewing for a dev job.

While waiting for responses and continuing to apply, I started the thinkful curriculum and made it all the way to about the halfway mark in about 2 months, I had a good understanding of JS, HTML and CSS and I was starting to feel confident, which came with perfect timing.

I heard back from a surprising amount of companies, some of whom were even looking to fill mid level positions. One response stood out to me because it seemed like the company had reasonable expectations, competitive pay, strong publications written about their business model and they stood for a good cause.

The response said roughly the following, hey Jaice, we like your resume, you have no experience with react, no dev experience at all actually, so complete this assessment.

It was a algorithmic interview, which I bombed, but as the true salesman would, I persisted and asked for additional assessments and tests so that I could better prove my worth to the company.

They sent over a react challenge and on that day I wrote my first line of react. It felt great, the system made sense, everything was working great and I built out a little response web application to dynamically render grids of images from an api and apply filters to them using dynamic css variables, the user could specify grid sizing, image width, opacity and grey scale.

Looking back on it I would have probably done some things differently, but they were impressed enough with my code that they extended a one month contract to test the waters with me. Which, of course, I graciously accepted.

When I started work I was getting paid as a contractor and I wasn't entirely sure how things would work out so I kept learning aggressively and I kept putting in the required work to make sure that I was growing as a developer and becoming more hire able with time.

Four weeks went by, I had new interviews set up expecting the end of my contract, I had worked on tons of leetcode and then out of nowhere, my contract manager hopped on a video call and extended a full time offer.

I was shocked, I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I thought I was going to make a couple thousand bucks and be on my way, but here I am now, working as a full time front end software engineer making more money than I could ever have imagined with a company that I love and people that I have a ton of fun working with.

I am grateful for the amazing amount of support that the coding community has offered me over the last few months and I am proud to be apart of such a great group.

Thank you for reading,

Sorry if things are brief, I tried to hit the main points so that this story wasn't two hundred thousand words.

Jaice de Celis

A developers best asset is their ability to learn

Jaice de Celis — Tue, 01 Sep 2020 20:24:04 +0000

Those of you who are already developers, I want you to think about all of the time you spend learning, and those of you who are not, do the same.

Its absolutely astronomical. Apart from researchers, developers spend more time learning than almost every other career on planet earth. The reason being, technology changes everyday and the sheer amount of creation that is happening now can be quite overwhelming if you are not consistently on top of it.

Now, think about the last time you learned to learn.

Yes, I wrote that correctly and no it is not a typo. You spend a crazy amount of time learning now and you are not being as efficient as you can be which in return is making you less productive as a developer.

Think about it this way, the developer who knows how to learn effectively can write more code, market themselves as knowing new technologies faster and overall can just produce more.

So lets look at a two learning techniques that can change the game for you in your learning journey and that can compound into an insane amount of personal growth over the following years.

Learn in Short Bursts
The human mind is not meant to retain all of the information that is thrown at it, only what is important. And that information requires what I like to call a setting time before it is cemented in your mind and can be used at a later date. The unfortunate truth is that in any given session of learning your mind can only understand and retain X amount of information before it starts throwing out what it thinks may be less important, even if it is not. In order to combat this effect you have to figure out what your setting time is, in my case it is typically between 30 and 45 minutes, and I am usually full after about an hour of consistent learning. So my learning routine is usually as follows:

Learn for 60 minutes while taking notes.
Break for 45 minutes while reviewing notes (This helps cement learning)
Repeat.

I find that I can do this for as long as I want and my retention does not decrease, however, you may find you need to stop after one or two rotations, it is completely dependent on how your brain works.

Notes, Notes, Notes
This one goes hand in hand with the last technique. As you can see, I break my learning into 3 parts learning 2 parts note review. The way that I get the notes is, well, I write them.

Writing notes can be tedious for many people, but because most of the learning that I do is on my computer through videos and text, I have developed a note taking system with google docs that organizes each topic of learning into headings, important tips into bullet points and abstract topics into more verbose breakdowns.

The best part about notes is that you retain what you write much more effectively and they can be used as mental bookmarks to recall topics that you have previously explored. When you review your notes, you should be able to picture when you wrote them and the resources you were using to learn while writing said notes.

I encourage you to take the leap into learning how to learn, there are an insane amount of available resources on learning how to learn that you may find incredibly beneficial.

If there is one thing you can take away from this short article it is that learning new technology is important, but what is more important is how you learn. If you can increase your learning efficiency you can become a better developer faster than the competition which will make you a more valuable developer in the long run.

Good luck!

Forem: Jaice de Celis

Zero to Hero : How I got hired 3 months after writing my first line of code.

A developers best asset is their ability to learn