Can you juggle? I hope so.

Seth Alexander
Jul 23, 2017 · 3 min read

So I thought that being finished with school would make life a little simpler. I was wrong. Between attending meetups, networking, doing career prep stuff, accepting a Teaching Assistant position at Flatiron School, continuing to learn new topics, doing algorithm challenges, interviewing, and extending my projects, I’m very busy. Oh yeah, and writing my blog at least once a week. Oh, and watching the kiddos full time while my wife is at work. I’m actually ending up doing less coding than I would like. However, I know in time this will change. I’ll be all done with my career prep and just working the plan. I’ll be done with things like watching Four Semesters of Computer Science in 5 Hours.

However, you reap what you sow. I think a big part that is missing from the program I just completed is throwing career prep in earlier. I’ve realized that the things I have been doing during my time in the boot camp have been very beneficial to me. I think a lot of people miss out on this and then it takes them longer than it should to land a job. The biggest thing is the networking. I think every student should be instructed to find at least one technical meetup and attend every time they meet for the duration of the program and beyond. This will produce ripe fruit.

In the middle of all this I’ve scored an interview. I passed my technical interview and was happy to NOT be quizzed on any Computer Science topics. I was also happy to be told not to worry about writing the most efficient code but to write code that works. In the end, this is what my live coding ended up being:

I hit two real stumbling block. First, I initially wrote return str.reverse() for my first function. It started throwing errors when I tested it and I couldn’t remember why. Then it clicked. I can’t call reverse() on a string, only an array. The other place I got stuck was on line 18. I couldn’t remember unshift(). I simply asked, “May I Google the correct function instead of guessing?” To which I was told yes. Luckily for me, the lead who was on the interview had earlier said he was asked by someone in an interview once if they could Google and he told them yes. This did not make me feel as nervous about asking the question. I know not every interview will be like this though.

Ultimately, I’m in a similar place to when I started coding. Trying to figure out what to learn next? I’ve come full circle. It’s the circle of life of a developer. Something that came up in conversation today from a working web developer I know was in regard to this. He was talking about a friend who is about 5 years behind current technology and is going to either have to take a pay cut for his next position or level up a good bit before it. This was one of the most attractive things to me about becoming a developer. I’ll have to keep up with technology and will never stop learning. I would get bored in the restaurant world after a year of being somewhere. The mental stimulation just wasn’t there for me.

While I can’t actually juggle pins or tennis balls. I think I’m doing a damn good job juggling this crazy thing called full time job hunting.


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Seth Alexander

Written by

Husband & Daddy. Builder @teamairship. @FlatironSchool graduate.

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