Week 10 — Month in Retrospect

For the past ~2 months I’ve been writing about my experience learning fullstack software development — my goal is to be good enough to land a SWE internship next summer.

This post covers the latest week (Nov. 1 ~ 7).

Biggest learnings:

• Importance of routine. A good routine can inoculate your plan against the bumps on life’s road. A lack of one can mean you stumble about blindly.
• Make contact. I started this with the goal of landing a SWE internship next summer. I’m pretty much there today — half a year ahead of schedule. This is because I didn’t just code — I blogged, and told people what I was up to. One of those people asked me to build the frontend for his startup, less than two months after I wrote my first line of JavaScript. That wouldn’t have happened if I were content with simply doing the work, and not publicising it.
• Ask for help: I quickly realised I’d need all the help I could get. I reached out, and am astounded at how helpful people have been. One senior frontend dev has spent hours talking to me, coaching me through the initial phase of my work, and sending me some of his code to learn from. He didn’t know I existed two weeks ago.

Skills I’ve used so far (beyond what I listed previously):

• State management with Redux;
• Styling in React with Material UI;
• Communication in a business setting;

What I’ve built:

Short clip showing what the React frontend (w/ Material UI, Redux) looks like so far:

Earlier work can be found on my GitHub.