What did your progression from complete beginner, to ____ look like?
This comment was posted to reddit on May 30, 2015 at 8:31 pm and was deleted within 1 day, 2 hour(s) and 49 minutes.
What did your progression from complete beginner, to ____ look like?
Got a B.S. in IT, not CS, and worked as an "IT Engineer" for while going through college (which I spaced out a long time, 7.5 years) for 3.5 years
Spent probably 6 or so months trying to learn the basics of programming, choosing Android/Java. Then started looking for a place that would take a chance with me as a junior developer
Got a job as a work form home C#/.NET dev at a startup shop for 1.5 years. It was fun, basically learned how to program, lived in virginia beach and Costa Rica while working as well.
Got let go cause I wasn't moving fast enough as a young/junior developer and we weren't meeting our incredibly aggressive deadlines (it was a big contract with a huge company we were lucky to win. To win it, certain promises were made..). Started the job search again hoping that I could maybe jump to Java or Python or Ruby, realized that was a lofty goal, and went back to school for the last semester to finally finish up my degree to make the job search easier. There was too much work to do at my last job to go to school at the same time (Plus I lived in costa rica, so it would have been hard).
Cut a deal with my younger brother who was finishing his CS degree that very semester - I would do all the work for his last class, "Advanced Web Programming" (or something), and he would do all the work for my networking class that I had no interest in and would be easy for him to find the answers for the homework online for me. This turned out to be a fucking great choice for me, I learned a shit ton doing the work for this class and I learned all about javascript/api/ajax stuff and was still able to cram for the boring network classes and we both passed (though the CS teacher was such a hardass grading my stuff because my brother was a slapdick/clown in his class and I don't think he liked him, hah! For the final project, he gave me a C with some stupid note about how he didn't see how it worked and what it did. After pointing him to the footer of the website where it was all explained pretty clearly he responded by upping the grade to an A).
Worked for 3 months as a consulting engineer, building a "Optionally Bounded Queue" data structure + tests + documentation in AS3, because unlike other languages there weren't 5000 libraries implementing it already.
Tried landing a job in anything but C#/.NET, but with my limited experience it was a lot tougher to do that I had anticipated. I ended up settling for another job at a mid-sized company as a C#/.NET dev
Spent every fucking night after work for 2 years learning as much as I could so I could jump to a higher paying, more challenging job. I picked up Ruby, Python, and node/js during this time and built several toy projects or solved problems at /r/dailyprogramming with them and put them on github. I wanted desperately to get out of the .NET world.
Went through several interviews with well respected startups in DC and SF, but couldn't seem to get past that last step (6 months)
Finally landed a position at a respected start-up as a senior full stack dev, working with python and building microservices in node (current)