Becoming a Software Developer
I graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in December 2018 after a major change and five years of biochemistry instruction coming to the realization like many other college grads that my major did not line up exactly with what I wanted to pursue as a career. Happy having studied what I did however I took a month while working a part time job to take a personal inventory and think on what really spoke to me during college. As it so happens, that was programming!
The main thing that I reflected on was doing otherwise intensive calculations easily with matlab and some basic scripting, giving me great power where I might have struggled otherwise. I remembered the spark of joy that I had from running scripts successfully and thought that there had to be a similar career related to what I had been doing that would bring me as much fulfillment.
That's where my dad - a software engineer - stepped in and gave me a hand. He referred me to talk to a couple of junior coworkers of his with non-traditional cs backgrounds, one of which I got in contact with who had completed a coding bootcamp. After talking with his coworker I studied for, applied to, and then attended App Academy in May of 2019.
I graduated App Academy having studied Ruby, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, React, Redux, SQL, Express, and other technologies in August of 2019. I was identified as an above average student within the cohort and was invited to work as a tutor for App Academy's Jumpstart program which I enjoyed for 4 months, preparing lectures and teaching basic Ruby scripting while job searching on the side. In addition to my time spent job searchinig and teaching I self-studied Python, putting myself through cousera's UMich Python for Everybody course! Ultimately I resigned from the role in December of 2019 to commit 100% full time to my job search, successfully securing an internship with Rally Health a subsidiary company of United Health Care in March of 2020.
During my internship I have acted essentially as a full-stack engineer having touched parts of the Recover product's frontend and backend both learning and working with Angular, Scala, and Ruby while on the job. I primarily focused on the frontend, learning and implementing feature work with Angular 9 and testing on an e2e level which I hadn't done before, using Selenium WebDriver for e2e tests. I am grateful to my mentors on that team for helping me daily and giving me a great experience integrating into a large codebase and company.
My internship ran from May 18th to August 7th and I am currently seeking FTE or another internship focused on the front-end whether React, Angular, or even Vue.js (I'd happily pick up another framework on the job). However, I am capable and eager to work on the backend as well! I truly felt the same spark of joy that I did at the beginning of this journey to becoming a Software Developer at this internship and am looking for more opportunities to do so!