Journey software engineer

Recognizing that customer experience is pivotal to the success of a product or service is also a requirement for this job.

As an agile team, the decision making process is driven by the ability to create the most compelling product for our customers, while simultaneously taking into account the natural limitations of a start-up environment. The immediate need is for an intermediate to senior individual contributor for our in-progress products. This will quickly be eclipsed as our product suite grows to become a core product design and development role.

Our first products have been delivered to market and have been validated. Journey now needs to scale our products and scale our team to meet immediate customer needs and increased product functionality.

The successful candidate will immediately become a critical member of this team. Journey uses a modern set of development tools wrapped in the SAFE agile methodology.

Fortunately I found freeCodeCamp. What got me most excited about this curriculum was that it helped me focus my time on building instead of worrying about what to build. Also if you get far along the program, you get to build projects for nonprofits! Being part of freeCodeCamp was also a gateway to joining an amazing community that helped me find other external resources that have led me to land my first software engineer role. I started attending meetups early in my journey.

Meetups helped me learn something new, meet others also trying to change career paths, and network. But once I was there, I learned so much, shared tips and resources, and usually left inspired!

Even after having attended so many meetups, I still get nervous before attending one. Through meetups, I also got to meet creators of frameworks, courses, and platforms that have positively influenced my life and have been an inspiration. Some meetups were motivational and others were more technical. I met so many women also trying to break into software development and this is where my supportive community started.

I decided to use Twitter as my main way of interacting with other developers and aspiring developers. I have been able to share learning resources, my struggles, accomplishments, and anything else that might benefit others in my field. Since I follow developers, my twitter feed mainly consists of tech news, articles, resources, and any other technical goodies.

Through my twitter community, I was able to receive the feedback needed to help convince myself that I had what it took to be a developer. I was able to get the mentorship to help me when I was stuck or felt lost in my coding journey. People in this field really want to help!

I started listening to engineering podcasts on my commute to work and I can tell you this is the best tip I have followed. You get to learn from developers that have been in this industry for years who are excited to teach and share their ideas and experiences. These developers are funny, caring, smart, and excited.

I was asked many times during my interviews whether I listened to podcasts. This was a great way to show how proactive and passionate I was about this field. Attending my first hackathon helped me experience what being a developer was all about in a short amount of time and boosted my confidence.

The following were a few things that I got to experience for my first time at the event:. Attending a hackathon also helped me meet people with a common interest. The purpose of the hackathon I attended was to unite women to solve global challenges with tech. I met others that were also passionate about working towards solving global issues like Domestic Violence and Human Trafficking.

Interviewers loved that I attended a hackathon and asked what I learned during the experience. If you want to learn more about what to expect and the rest of the benefits you might get from your first hackathon, you can read about my experience here. It also helped me find a real world project that I was passionate about and ultimately helped me land interviews. Contributing to open source was very intimidating so I kept pushing it off.

Once I finally got the courage to figure out how to start contributing, Hacktoberfest came at the perfect time. Hacktoberfest is a month challenge in October where you get the opportunity to submit 5 pull requests and win swag all while raising awareness for open source and learning along the way. This challenge motivated me to find meetups that would help me find projects that were helping the local community.

I found a project that I was really passionate about. This project was brought up during every phone and onsite interview. Every interviewer asked me about the project, my contribution, and how we worked as a team. If you want to learn more about the skills and values gained when contributing to open source, you can read about my experience here.

Online was where I had the opportunity to share what I was learning and working on. It also helped me express what I was interested in, my mission for becoming a software developer, and who I am. Below is a checklist of what I covered to verify I was sharing as much as I could online:.

Most importantly, buying my own domain name and taking it live really helped me establish myself online. I highly recommend this. Companies will see that you are capable of setting up your own domain. I also recommend making your website secure, mobile responsive, and performant. I wrote about how I made my portfolio website blazing fast with Gatsby. I started getting into the habit of reading engineering blogs and articles in the mornings and anywhere else where I had some spare time.

Whether that was waiting for the train or standing in line at the store. It taught me how to communicate technical ideas by simply reading. Possibly most importantly, you are always changing, and what interests you today may not be what interests you tomorrow. One of the most incredible things about being a software engineer, in my opinion, is the feeling that there are endless opportunities — there are so many different rabbit holes to go down, and so many different avenues to choose from.

Do yourself the favour of not becoming complacent in what you are currently doing. But through continually exposing yourself to new areas, you will see the work in front of you through a new lens. You will be able to approach it from original angles, and have additional tricks up your sleeve for troubleshooting when bugs pop up.

Your code will never be perfect, but you do have a duty to write better code today than you did yesterday, and to incrementally improve the code that you have written. But the user experience and impact of your software is predicated on the quality of your code. And you do this by — you guessed it — bettering yourself as an engineer through learning, learning, learning.

I always try to encourage people not to get caught up so much even in what they are learning, but just to ensure that they are. Cart 0.