Road to My First iOS Job

I finally got my first iOS job. Here are the steps I took, the mistakes I made, and some statistics.

I finally got my first iOS job in December 2020, while spending the better part of a year focusing my learnings into Swift and the Apple ecosystem. In this post I’ll share a bit of my own background followed by what I did, what I focused on, and what I would have done differently in the job search process. I will also share numbers and statistics I collected along the way.

Background

I’ve always been interested in computers, gaming, and building things. It took me quite a long time to realize that programming combines these fields and could be a profession I would enjoy.

When I was in elementary school, I would spend most of my time playing video games and trying out interesting ‘things’ on the computer. This broad pool of ‘things’ basically meant computer hacks that would amuse me and my friends. For example, I would write text based adventure games that were played in the command line. Or, I would write small shell scripts to rotate the screen orientation and open the CD-drive every minute or so, which I would then install in school computers and make it run on start up. Now that I think of it, the IT person at my school probably hated me.