A New Beginning, Part 20
WEEK 19: UPDATING MY PORTFOLIO
Now that I’ve finished the regular Firehose App-building lessons, it’s time to divide my time between the Agile team building our Wookie chess-playing app and various forms of job prep.
An enjoyable part of that has been updating my portfolio to show pictures of and links to all the apps I’ve been building. I’ve also updated the writeups, including my opening statement.
By the time I got it done, I really FELT how much I’ve truly become a software engineer. If you like, you can check out my gorgeous new portfolio by clicking here.
MY FIRST JOB APPLICATION!
To dip my toe in the job-finding water I checked out a few job boards just to see what kinds of jobs appeared. One of the remote jobs actually sounded so appealing that it gave me the impetus to update my resumé. It was for TeamSnap, which helps coaches and players and parents connect more easily for team sports.
I went ahead and applied, for two jobs actually: full stack web developer (Ruby/JavaScript) and quality assurance tester. Then I spent several days happily imagining getting hired right away and working with some of the great people showcased on their website.
Well, the answer came back, “We have reviewed your resume and determined that there is not a close enough match to the skills and experience that the team is seeking at this time.” Same answer for both jobs. Sigh.
In the meantime, though, I had gone to a local meetup of the suncoast.js group and seen a truly inspiring introduction to DevOps.
DevOps, it turns out, is a truly revolutionary extension of the idea of “continuous development,” which makes it possible for a developer to write code and then have it automatically tested and deployed — kind of like Travis CI on steroids.
The guy giving the presentation — Danny Murowky — works for a company called Stelligent that has apparently gotten a bunch of money by being bought and is aggressively hiring. Hmmmm…
MORE REVIEW, MORE SOLID FOUNDATION
Over the weekend I went through my notes on the first Quote Generator app I had built, summarizing what’s involved in getting a rails app up and running. And you know what?
Once again I found that what was fuzzy when I first did it now seems crystal clear. AND I learned some subtleties as I reviewed my notes that escaped me the first time.
The whole exercise left me feeling much better about the foundation I’ve been building — and eager to put it to use!
(More to come… click here!)