Category: Uncategorized

Is it worth looking for jobs abroad?

I’ve always been interested in living abroad, especially in Europe. Maybe it’s the allure of the European culture or the just wanting to experience something new, but there has always been something that’s made me want to go and live there.

From what I’ve read, the biggest tech hubs in Europe are in London, Berlin, and Dublin. Other places I’d love to live in one day are Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, or Stockholm. While these cities sound like great places to live on paper and beautiful tourist destinations, what is it like to work in tech there and what are the pros and cons of living abroad? Here are some of my subjective thoughts.

What are the pros of living abroad?
Great opportunities in a different environment – What does this mean you ask? When people think of the tech industry many think of Silicon Valley and the FAANG companies here in the United States. However, these opportunities exist outside of the Silicon Valley (or for that matter, the United States bubble). Dublin bosts offices for Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook with a growing tech scene. London is one of the biggest financial hubs in the world and to accompany that, a huge tech hub as well. Spotify headquarters are in Stockholm and many more.

Work-life balance – The unfortunate reality of working in the United States for many (and in this case, I am speaking generally about the job environment) is that many places don’t offer the greatest work-life balance. This is especially true in the tech industry where long hours are routine and the benefits offered by the company don’t match the long hours put in. Many companies in Europe routinely offer 30 days of vacation per year in a much more relaxed environment that doesn’t stress constant work.

Social welfare/security – This might be a divisive topic (even though unfortunately shouldn’t be) but the social warfare systems of the many European countries are miles (or should I say kilometers?) ahead of the United States. Healthcare is free and provided for by the government (yes I understand the taxes are higher, but at least the taxes are used on something useful). Many countries have mandated paid parental leave for both new mothers and fathers. University education is free or low-cost. Public transportation is well developed. All these factors lead to a better standard of living even though the starting salaries are lower in Europe.

What are some of the difficulties of working in tech abroad?

The barrier to entry – What do I mean by that? As solely a US citizen, working in European countries require work visa sponsorships, which some companies would prefer not to go through the hassle of. Additionally, EU countries have a pool of EU applicants that don’t require work sponsorships.

Culture shock and the language barrier – Even though I do find the prospect of having to learn a new language exciting, it nevertheless will make life a bit more difficult. Everyday tasks will be a bit more tedious since first and foremost, you don’t understand the language. Even though most big cities in Europe now have a sizable population that can speak English, without learning the local language it might feel like you are an outsider.

Lower wages – Here in the United States, salaries for the same positions are usually much higher than in Europe. The average software developer salary in the United States is $110,638 while the average salary in the UK is $68,462, $54,025 in the Netherlands, and $60,162 in Germany¹. Of course, many countries in Europe come with better social welfare as mentioned in the pros section that makes up for the difference in pay, the difference in pay is noticeable.

So, do I still want to work in Europe? Someday, I hope so. Getting a job here in the United States hasn’t been easy so I don’t have hopes that I’ll be landing my first job in tech outside of the United States – I don’t foresee a company going through the process of hiring an entry-level developer that requires visa sponsorship. But I do hold hope that maybe in the future I might make the move across the Atlantic.

1. https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/it-salaries-software-developer-trends

What technologies/frameworks/libraries interest me?

This post is inspired by a tech youtuber by the name of Ben Awad. At the start of each year he has a video that talks about the technologies that he was planning on learning. I thought it would be interesting to reflect on what I might be interested in learning in 2022.

Angular and TypeScript
I feel like the two go hand in hand with each other, since Angular (and not the no long supported Angular.js) requires you to use TypeScript. During a web development bootcamp I took while working at Northwestern, the frontend framework that was taught was React. While React seems to be the most popular framework that is being used today, I was never a fan of JSX. I also like the fact that Angular is a more opinionated framework than React; I like the fact that there is clear direction on how things need to be set up or written. TypeScript seemed to grow in popularity the past few years. While TypeScript offers all the features that JavaScript offers, TypeScript is a strongly typed langauge where you are able to declare types for you variables. Some advantages that people point out are that it helps catch bugs and helps with code readability, just some simple reasons to try my hand at TypeScript.

D3.js
D3.js is a JavaScript library for creating interactive data visualizations using HTML, SVG and CSS. While working at a research lab I mainly used R (as is most common in the scientific community for data analysis) to analyize our data and create tables and charts for publication. I find it pretty facinating that I could take my skills with web development and apply them to my biology background. When it comes to bioinformatics communicating findings through data is a core component. I feel like with D3.js, it might be able to open new pathways into data science and bioloinformatcs. There are a ton of very cool different ways to display data with D3.js, including maps, trees and more that are interactive and bring the data to life.

Just a couple examples from the D3 site:
https://observablehq.com/@d3/hierarchical-edge-bundling/2
https://observablehq.com/@d3/vector-field

Swift
I’ve already talked about Swift in a previous blog but I felt like I couldn’t keep it off of a blog about technologies I wish to learn because Swift is the number one new thing I would like to learn for 2022. Mobile software development is something I’ve had an interest in since taking CS492 here at OSU and I’ve been drawn to iOS development. I like that with Swift you are able to build native apps for iOS, watchOS and macOS and felt that it would open more doors than Flutter and Dart currently can. Luckily for this project we are able to create an app with Swift and gain experience with Swift, Xcode and storyboards/UIKit. I would like to explore SwiftUI as well on my own as it does seem like Apple is pushing for it to be the future over UIKit (just as Swift replaced objective-c as the primary language of iOS development).

The journey to becoming gainfully employed one day

I started the program here at OSU in the fall of 2019. At that time I was working as a research technologist at a research lab at Northwestern. With a biology bachelor’s degree, there aren’t that many jobs that don’t involve being a lab tech or lab manager. A biology major is usually a stepping stone to graduate school (for a Ph.D.) or to med school, none of which I was all that enthusiastic about spending the rest of my life doing. I had coded before in high school and undergrad and enjoyed it, and especially after taking a Webdev BootCamp offered by Northwestern, I felt like I needed to make the change.

I didn’t feel like I was ready for a job after the boot camp, due to a myriad of different reasons. So here I am in 2022, taking my final quarter of courses at OSU. The job search process has been tedious and hectic. Do I look for internships or go straight for a job? Coming from a different career field I do wonder if getting an internship will be better to gain some experience in the field? What type of job do I want and where? Am I in a position to be picky at all or should I just be happy to get an offer? These are a few of the questions I have while I apply for jobs at the moment and I am sure more questions will come as I continue.

What kind of job do I want? I have found Python to be the language I enjoy the most so far, so in that regard being a Python developer would be alright. I have also enjoyed mobile software development and enjoyed using Flutter. This quarter our project will be in Swift and having had a lot of interest in iOS development I hope that it might be able to open some doors into iOS developer jobs or internships. And of course, as I stated earlier I do have webdev bootcamp experience. But to be honest I don’t enjoy HTML, CSS, or Javascript all that much, though it won’t necessarily stop me from applying to web developer jobs.

So here I am. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get a job that I enjoy and in a city (or if I am really feeling adventurous – a new country) that I like. Till then I’ll keep applying and applying till I get something. Here’s to hoping 2022 will lead to positive results.

We’ve choosen to write our application in Swift. How will we fare?

I’ve had some interest in mobile software development since taking the course here at OSU. I think that was in part fueled by the fact that I didn’t have to deal with HTML5, CSS, and Javascript (although I really don’t dislike JS unlike a lot of developers that swear off web development). Luckily for this project, I was able to group up with a couple other students that were interested in creating a mobile app.

Our project requires us to create a crowdsourced bike-sharing app that allows users to add their own bikes into the database for people to use. We had two choices in mind for technologies we could use. First was Flutter, a framework written in Dart that we all had experience with from CS492. The second was Swift.

Swift is a language I had been interested in for a while but hadn’t brought myself to learn it yet and while Flutter’s potential seems high due to the ability to create cross-platform applications many of the jobs on the market are skewed toward native iOS and android jobs. Since one of our group members had some experience with Swift, and we were all keen on learning for potential job opportunities, we decided on Swift.

I was able to play around with Xcode and create a simple tip calculator app. Here are my first impressions. I found it interesting to use the storyboard and to add objects (such as text boxes, labels, buttons, etc) to the storyboard directly. Additionally, I found it to be a bit different from Flutter or traditional web development that you would connect your storyboard elements to the view controller and then write your logic there. I think it is helpful to me and user-friendly to see all the elements in the UI and directly link them. I do wish that like Flutter, there was a hot reload option. I did find the syntax to be somewhat like Python but also somewhat like Javascript as well. It is interesting that in Swift, let is for immutable variables while var is for mutable variables which could be a little bit confusing at first coming from Javascript.

I am excited to be able to use Swift for our project. I am glad to have a teammate that has some experience with Swift since it means that we aren’t all walking in the dark. Hopefully this quarter I’ll be able to have fun with the project and learning Swift~

Just a little bit about me and my journy here

Hi Everybody! (Hi Dr. Nick!)

Welcome to my first blog post. Here’s just a little bit about myself. I graduated in 2016 from Northwestern with a bachelor’s degree in biology. Going into undergrad I hadn’t given what I wanted to do much thought and just thought I would go to med school like my parents had hoped. But I realized (perhaps a bit too late) that I wasn’t interested in medicine. As an undergrad, I had enjoyed the coding in my bioinformatics course and a couple of CS classes I decided to take as a result. I decided that maybe I could still salvage my biology major and get a Ph.D. in bioinformatics.

I got my first job as a research technologist at a research lab at Northwestern, with the hopes of working hard and applying to graduate school. What I soon realized was that I liked the coding aspect of bioinformatics much more than the biology portion of bioinformatics. Unfortunately for me, there was far more biology than I would have liked… g story short, I decided I shouldn’t try to make something I didn’t like work for myself and decided to get into software development

Here at OSU I have particularly enjoyed Cloud Application Development and Mobile Software Development. I’ve found Python to be enjoyable to code in, more so than any other language due to the ease of readability and syntax. I also hope to be able to use Flutter more in the future, especially on our project this quarter. I like that it is cross-platform. While it does seem like React Native is much more popular at the moment, I’ve heard from some that in React Native, styling can show up differently between iOS and Android, while many Flutter developers haven’t had that issue. So for fewer headaches, I hope Flutter can be easier in that regard.

I am excited about what the quarter holds. Since this is my last quarter at OSU, I can only hope that it is a good one!