Writing and Programming from California to Prague
About three months ago, I decided to put my doctoral thesis in English on hold, sell most of my things and move from California to Prague to start my first job as a Junior Full Stack Developer at Pipedrive. This is a story about my journey and how I got to Pipedrive, Prague.
Since 2013 I have been pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of California Riverside, outside Los Angeles. In addition to teaching undergraduate film and literature classes, I spent several years working on a thesis project. My dissertation analyses the experimental art practices of a small group of twentieth-century American artists and writers.
In the summer of 2020, I committed myself to making a career change out of higher education. Without a specific job in mind, I knew that I needed work that would be intellectually challenging if I were to remain interested and motivated in the long run. I was also attracted to the flexibility that a career in tech could provide: finding software domains that match my interests, organizing my own schedule and remote job options. Beyond building an embarrassingly personal website in high school, I had no previous experience in IT. My initial plan was to take online courses and slowly develop my technical knowledge, but when I heard about a coding Bootcamp at my university, I decided to enroll.
From Scholarship to Software
My background in art criticism and education may not immediately make sense as a foundation for a career in software development. As I have learned more about programming, I came to find that humanities scholarship and web development actually have a lot in common. Both combine the creative with the logical. They are challenging endeavors that benefit from ongoing learning and continual revision. Over time, my awareness of the many intersections grew, along with my enthusiasm. Although I initially thought that my previous, non-technical experience would be irrelevant to development, I now realize that my background has provided me with a lot of important and valuable skills — communication, critical thinking and research, to name a few — that have helped me to get to where I am today.
Ultimately, while my work as a teacher and a researcher was very rewarding, I came to feel that the direct practicality and collaboration that is so fundamental to software development were missing from my daily work. In response to this feeling, in June 2020, I set a goal to devote 30–60 minutes a day towards learning web development. After doing some light internet browsing, I thought that computer science fundamentals would provide a strong foundation for learning programming, so I decided to start with a CS101 course on Udemy. In a way, the shift to fully remote university instruction gave me more freedom to balance my work with my new objective. When I heard about The Coding Bootcamp at my university, I felt that the structure of a curriculum and the community of students that the Bootcamp offered would be a good environment for me.
Bootcamp Life
Because the class was entirely online, I learned to remotely collaborate on projects with teammates from the very beginning. The class was a six-month, part-time, full-stack web development class focusing on the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Node and React. In addition to the essential languages of the web, we also learned some basics about databases and using git. The class met online three days a week for about three hours. Although it was roughly 10 hours of class time, we were expected to put in close to 15–20 weekly hours of work outside class meetings to practice our skills and solidify the concepts we covered.
During the week, we met twice in the evenings and we also had one class on Saturday mornings. The schedule was designed to accommodate people who were attending class while working full time. Because of my flexible work schedule, I was able to thrive with this schedule, but it was very demanding for many of my classmates with stricter work responsibilities. Every week, we had homework assignments related to our weekly topics, which we submitted by posting Github links. The teacher and teaching assistant encouraged us to keep our Github accounts active to establish professional visibility.
Every two months, we had to deliver a major group project. Of course, the opportunity to work on a larger project was rewarding in and of itself, but it was also a great chance to function within a self-organized team. For a final project, I worked with a team of three others to develop an inventory tracking application using React and MongoDB. One of our team members gathered specific information from her clients who worked in logistics about a major problem they faced: quick and easy access to inventory item locations in the warehouse. With this real-world use case, we each spent several hours a day over three weeks developing our application, “InHouse.” In addition to the supportive community, I think that this experience in building a full-stack web application with a team using the git version control system was one of the most valuable aspects of my Bootcamp experience.
Post-graduation Hustle
Immediately after completing the Bootcamp, I was determined to maintain my momentum, so I began applying to jobs and talking to as many people in the industry as I possibly could. Setting up 30-minute chats on zoom — what people sometimes call “informational interviewing”– was a great way to gather information about working in tech. I was able to ask people about their background, how they got into the field and what their workday is like in their current role. It was also a good chance to practice presenting myself and my interests in a low-stakes and supportive context.
At the same time, I continued to work on personal projects and jumped headfirst into LeetCode algorithm problems, something that was not a part of the core curriculum of the Bootcamp. I also continued to improve my personal website and started several projects to expand my portfolio. Probably one of the most difficult but important tasks for my website was making it mobile responsive!
I designed a landing page for a friend’s small business, which was a good chance to practice client requirements gathering, wireframing and Figma prototyping. I took part in an international hackathon called Hacktrix. Communicating with my partner and transcending a 12-hour time difference, together we built a simple news aggregator. The hackathon was another great collaboration experience and it gave me more practice in quickly developing an app that uses a third-party API service.
I also began helping a graduate student friend improve the structure of their excavation research database for their dissertation project in archaeology. That project was an opportunity to gather information about a particular problem while also learning how to effectively create an Entity Relationship Diagram using LucidChart. This technology helped me to visually plan out the structure of the database and the relationships between different tables.
Although I rarely completed (and certainly never sold) these projects, each of them helped me to learn new things while I continued to practice web development. They also enabled me to learn which aspects of development I enjoy more and where my (numerous, countless!) gaps in knowledge reside.
During my ongoing learning after graduating from the bootcamp, I became interested in Open Source communities. I started slowly by learning how to fork a repository and did some basic markdown housekeeping for a student-run resource called awesome4girls, which offers a curated list of events and projects in tech geared specifically for girls and women. My dive into the open-source community also brought me to AnitaB.org, a nonprofit organization working to improve inclusivity in tech. They have a number of student-friendly projects on Github and actively cultivate mentorship and contributions from new developers. Through this organization, I got my first experience setting up a more complicated local development environment on my computer.
Finding a place to land
I learned about Pipedrive during the research phase for one of my Bootcamp group projects. While trying to develop a project idea, I conducted some interviews with real estate professionals to gather information about their current software and look for potential opportunities to solve a problem. Armed with a relevant user story, I pitched a CRM project to track potential tenant leads and as a team we developed a modest, full-stack implementation. The research that I did for that project led me to Pipedrive as one of the top models for our small application.
When I first came across the job post for a Junior Developer position at Pipedrive, I was immediately struck by how entry-level-friendly the post was. It was clear that they really wanted a Junior Developer and that my inexperience was not some shortcoming that I had to justify or minimize. It was also clear that my professional development would be actively supported and that Pipedrive would be an ideal place to grow. There was no shortage of online information for me to access to familiarize myself with the company culture. I read several articles from this blog: one about our group product manager and another one on the onboarding process written by two junior engineers. I gained a lot of insight into the current topics, culture and people involved in the company from these publicly-accessible posts.
In the end, Pipedrive made it easy for me to make the big decision to accept the offer and move to Prague. I was honestly not expecting to pull off a complete career change one year after I started the Bootcamp. The accountability and community structures that the Bootcamp provided were definitely key factors of my success. While I was looking for my first software developer job, I noticed that a lot of online forums highlight (and bemoan) the low response rate in job applications. This is certainly a frustrating and complicated problem.
Still, in my case, I tried to not think about what I couldn’t control and focused on finding a balance between consistency, feedback processing and a strategic search. I found a company working on a product in an area that interested me and reached out to a Pipedrive recruiter directly on LinkedIn. But it was also important for me to maintain a healthy mindset, so I made sure to pace myself, exercise and spend time with friends. Resting and walking my dog Poppy were essential parts of the search!
I’m glad that my circuitous career route has led me here to Prague, and I hope that this story might offer some perspective for other potential Pipedrivers.
Here at Pipedrive’s Prague office, our Group Product Manager Michal Smetana has been organizing monthly meetups. During the fall this year we hosted an event on GraphQL at Scale with guest speakers and a live stream of the event. We have also had a meetup on Advanced Microservices. Check out our Pipedrive Talks Prague meetup group to see a list of all upcoming events and recordings from previous events. If you can’t make it in person you can join remotely!
Interested in working in Pipedrive?
We’re currently hiring for several different positions in several different countries/cities.
Take a look and see if something suits you
Positions include:
- Junior Developer
- Senior Business Analyst
- Software Engineer in DevOps Tooling
- Infrastructure Engineer
- And several more
