The Full Stack Hustle

Michelle Willcox
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

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

At least the Bay Area hustle has some good views.

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

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.

Coding Tutorial Sites

Meetups

Great way to meet other programmers, learn new topics, and these meetups specifically have interview/algorithm prep meetups almost every month

Podcasts

Listening to other developer’s coding journeys can be a great way to get insight into your own career path/search.

Michelle Willcox

Written by

SF, CA .Web Engineer at Strava & riding cx for LOW.

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