Then: Woodworker, Now: Junior Full Stack Developer

This week on the blog, we’re featuring one of our former students, Noel Worden, who got a job before even finishing our program. Check out what he’s doing now and his day-to-day at Canvas United.

Before I finished the Part-Time Web Developer program with Bloc I landed a job at a New York City based agency, Canvas United, that was in the process of opening a Denver office. I accepted a Junior Full Stack position even though it was obvious to everyone that my Rails skills far outweighed my front-end skills. I was very open during the interview process about what I did and did not know, all the while emphasizing my willingness to continue learning.

Being that I work at an agency, I have the opportunity to work with numerous projects, in several languages, and in varying stages of completion. I chose to pursue agency work for the specific reason of working on a variety of languages and focuses. At this point, I still feel my strongest language is Rails, but I’m improving my front-end skills every day and getting paid to do it. I have worked on one greenfield project, dataminr.com, where I coded the entire back-end, worked with the senior front-end developer to build out some pages, and wired it all together. I’ve done a few months of maintenance of 5–6 different projects, all presenting unique challenges, and I helped build out React components for Canvas United’s new website, canvasunited.com.

My Bloc mentors were instrumental in my success. Because of unexpected circumstances, I ended up with two different mentors during my schooling, both were absolutely top notch. Their guidance undoubtedly lead to my getting a position before finishing the program. Besides school, another huge factor in my job-landing success was networking. I started attending code-related meetups even before I started school. Meetups are great places to meet people and potentially find work when you are ready.

I got both an internship and my job through contacts I met at meetups.

I started an internship after I was done with the first half of my program. At the time, Bloc’s Part-Time Web Developer Track was back-end first, and I wanted to stay sharp with Rails while I dove into the front-end section. It was a relatively minimal commitment, two hours in the morning, twice a week, but it taught me a lot that I currently use in my day-to-day workflow. My skills with git improved exponentially, especially in the realm of collaborative projects. This helped me tremendously when I was starting my new position. I was comfortable that I could push up code and not be concerned that I was going to blow something up. It also meant that any questions I did have were related to the company’s workflow, and not to git in general. The internship helped me refine my searching ability in projects that I didn’t write myself. There’s a lot of minutia to that process, which I hadn’t really considered until I had someone looking over my shoulder and I was asked to find where that one checkbox lives in a project containing hundreds of files. Basically, the internship helped me get all of the ‘first job jitters’ out of the way.

The internship translated pretty well to my current job. We start every day with a team-wide stand up, which we do on Google Hangouts. This meeting allows us to know where everyone’s at for the day and can identify solutions or pairing options for potential problems that may come up. Once that wraps up I head over to my JIRA board, which is where we keep our project tickets (it’s similar to Trello or Waffle.io). I happen to have a whiteboard that I use pretty regularly with the more complicated tickets, it really helps to break the bigger tasks into smaller, more manageable pieces, and I can then really pinpoint where I may need help.

Once I have an idea of my path I’ll pull down the latest changes from the remote repo, start a new branch, and get to work. When I think I’ve found the best solution to the task I’ll push up a pull request, which can be looked at by a number of people, depending on the project. I’ve always gotten positive, productive feedback on pull requests comments, which is a great indicator of the kind of team I work with. Once the pull request gets approved it will get merged into the master and I’m off to JIRA to find my next task. If it’s been a particularly difficult task I’ll take a few minutes -or a few hours- and make some detailed notes about the solution. Note-taking does two things, first, it helps the solution really stick, and it’s also a reference that I can come back to or share with others.

For me, this new career is about the wins, big and small, and almost daily. I am constantly learning, and I get to see the results build up to the launch of a new or updated website for an exciting client. It’s incredibly rewarding, and I’m happy that I’ve found a career path I can see myself in for many, many years.