During the last few weeks, I’ve continued the Data Structures and Algorithms course on Udemy as well as refreshed myself on a handful of React and Redux concepts in preparation for my next position. After reflecting on my journey as a developer, this is definitely the best decision that I’ve ever made. It’s been quite a challenge to reach this point in terms of the mental struggles that I dealt with, but it’s how you react and cope with these situations. There were times where I was not entirely optimistic about what came next or what lies ahead. It wasn’t so much a fear of learning Ruby on Rails or JavaScript, but I knew that I would eventually be assessed on my skills.
Software Development was not something that I considered as a potential career track until some months after I graduated from Rider University. While studying Journalism, I gained experience creating multi-media packages for feature stories and wanted to take a web design course to strengthen my digital media and coding skills. I’ve mentioned that software development is a combination of architecture and writing. You build a support structure, but also tell a story. I started to reflect on my hobbies from an early age, such as my interest in computers and passion for building things and realized that it wasn’t going to be such an intense shift from what I was doing.
In my last blog post, I referenced how I’ve been reviewing JavaScript concepts for the past few weeks in order to improve my critical thinking and problem solving skills. As software development continues to evolve, finding new ways to refactor and debug your code are incredibly helpful. One of my main goals for March was working on Data Structures and Algorithms as they are not only a major component of technical interviews, but also a core part of refactoring and building functions for all applications. With that in mind, I decided to start taking a course on Udemy that focused on this and so far it’s been a great experience.
Throughout the past week, I’ve been working on some coding challenges as well as reviewing JavaScript concepts to prepare for technical interviews. It’s given me a lot of perspective on my problem solving and analytical skills. Recently I was given feedback on a project that I built utilizing the Angular framework. While there are several reactions that could have emerged from this, I took it as an incredible learning experience and decided to focus on finding different ways to improve as a software engineer. I remember creating a study guide to prepare some of my portfolio project assessments and after practicing writing block statements, callback functions, arrow functions, I realized that they were used pretty frequently throughout the code.
Back in December, I finished reading “The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide,” written by John Sonmez and it gave me an incredible perspective on the different avenues that a Software Engineer can go once they begin their career. During my job search, I’ve come across a variety of positions that have ranged in tech stacks and titles, but what I found most interesting is that they always included new frameworks, libraries, and languages that I had yet to build with. The next question then becomes do I invest my time learning all of these for this specific company. What if another opportunity comes along that is closer to my skillset. There’s no perfect answer to this as the industry is constantly evolving and over time, the popularity of certain tech stacks will rise and fall.