The Full Stack Hustle
Resources I found useful during my year long full stack engineering job search in the Bay Area

I recently made the transition from being an east coast CS grad with experience working in the very, very dated corporate financial enterprise software industry- to wanting to jump into the pool of full stack web development in the extremely competitive climate of the Bay Area.
This is quite a jump when you’re used to using Visual Studios all the time and when all your frontend design involves lovely things like WPF templates (if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry, you don’t want to). So I picked up freelance work for almost no money, moonlighted as a contract worker as a bike courier, to a full stack bootcamp teacher assistant, to a children’s after school programming instructor. And I slowly started interviewing for my dream job on and off for almost a whole year.
The hustle never ends when you’re a developer but fortunately, I was able to land my absolute dream job after a year of soul searching and job searching as a full stack Web Engineer at Strava. After plowing through so many articles on tech job search strategies and going down the technical interviewing rabbit hole (I can write a whole other article on that) I’ve come to find a lot of good resources that really helped me. I’ve compiled them below for those that are also looking to start or switch into the full stack development world:
General Articles/Resources
- http://haseebq.com/how-to-break-into-tech-job-hunting-and-interviews/ — Hands down the best, most comprehensive article on tech interviewing
- https://github.com/bmorelli25/Become-A-Full-Stack-Web-Developer — Great compilation of links
- https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university
- https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/
- http://www.thatjsdude.com/interview/index.html
- http://www.programcreek.com/2012/11/top-10-algorithms-for-coding-interview/
- https://www.pramp.com/ — Free, online, mock interview practice
Interactive Coding Challenges
Super helpful to do these in prep for the whiteboarding/technical question portion of interviewing. Let’s be real nobody wants to do this all day but get in the habit of trying to do atleast one coding challenge a day and it will a lot more bearable.
- https://www.freecodecamp.com/challenges/get-set-for-our-algorithm-challenges — Highly recommend the Basic/Int/Adv Algorithm sections, but the site as a whole has tons of other great coding projects
- https://leetcode.com/
- https://codefights.com/
- https://www.hackerrank.com/
- https://www.interviewbit.com/
- https://www.codewars.com/
- https://www.interviewcake.com/ — Sign up for the newsletter and get a new interview question (with solutions if you get stuck) every week
Coding Tutorial Sites
- https://www.codecademy.com/
- https://www.codeschool.com/
- https://www.udemy.com/courses/ — They frequently put these courses on sale for $10! Sign up for their newsletter to get notified.
- https://www.udacity.com/
- https://scotch.io/
Meetups
Great way to meet other programmers, learn new topics, and these meetups specifically have interview/algorithm prep meetups almost every month
- https://www.meetup.com/learn-to-code-san-francisco/
- https://www.meetup.com/hackreactor/
- https://www.meetup.com/Free-Code-Camp-SF/
- https://www.eventbrite.com/o/rithm-school-11279356650 — Local coding bootcamp that does free workshops on a ton of different tech topics
Podcasts
Listening to other developer’s coding journeys can be a great way to get insight into your own career path/search.
