Recently I graduated from Flatiron School’s Software Engineering Program, and while I had already networked with several friends and former colleagues about job prospects, I hadn’t applied to any jobs just yet since I was working day and night to finish my curriculum, my final project, and an open source project contribution.
For my final project - a React/Redux front-end with a Rails API and backend - I planned on doing what I had done for previous projects: any cracks in my knowledge about the particular language or topic I could figure out during the project because this is the opportunity to test and fail repeatedly until you get it right. You live in the land of the failing in coding, and it’s exciting and fulfilling for me to work my way out of it.
While working on my Rails/JS project, I was running into a lot more issues than normal. Jquery and AJAX are rarely used anymore so there wasn’t much point in using those, but I haven’t learned React yet, so I was trying to get by with fetch() and Javascript alone.
After speaking with several VPs and Directors of Engineering that I used to work with while I was in sales, a common tip provided for someone entering a coding bootcamp was that I should contribute to open source projects on Github to impress employers when looking for ajob.
I know it’s very common to mention how far you can come in just a couple months of coding bootcamps, but I am proud to be where I am. A little under two months ago, I had only built my first gem to scrape headlines from a news website, and now I’m building a fully functional rails application.