Throughout the past several weeks, I’ve discussed a variety of lessons that I’ve learned from “The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide”, written by John Sonmez. This includes the importance of networking, writing tests, collaboration, and learning how technology stacks affect every step of the development and production of an application. One of the biggest struggles for me as I was learning to become a Full Stack Developer was asking for help. In my mind, if I couldn’t figure out how to solve a problem, I’m not valuable or motivated enough to pursue this. I was always trying to jump to the solution instead of taking a step-by-step process. I’m thrilled that this mindset has been obliterated. It’s been an incredible journey to learn the different programming languages and frameworks, connect with other software developers, and explore the various career opportunities.
One of my main focuses for the past month has been to learn Angular and Typescript, not just to expand on my skill set, but also for a potential opportunity at Chefmod. At first, downloading the packages to my laptop was a difficult process, especially after the recent update of Mac OS Catalina which altered the interactive shell for the terminal. It reminded me of when I was trying to work on the labs in the JavaScript section and kept getting errors that I didn’t implement. However, I was able to finally solve the issue with some guessing and the help of StackOverflow. When it came to finally start to coding through walkthroughs and tutorials and eventually on my own, I think a large part of why I didn’t struggle as much to learn both of them is because of time management strategies that I’ve utilized and my knowledge of other JavaScript frameworks such as React. Once I had an understanding of the basics such as components, modules, and services, it became much easier to develop the front-end.
This experience also got me thinking about what kind of developer I want to be because there are so many avenues that you can take. Since graduating, I’ve been applied to a variety of companies that are hiring for software developers from front-end to full-stack to more centralized engineers. As Sonmez says, “software developers do a lot more than just write code.” When I reflect on why I decided to study software development, it wasn’t just because it combined my architect and writing aspirations. Software Developers create immersive user experiences and they build applications that revolutionize the world of technology for both the engineer and the user. I’m glad that I decided to take this career path.