I finally did it! I got hired as an associate software developer. This is the culmination of journey that begun over four years ago, back in 2017, when I set my sights on becoming a software developer in some capacity and started learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript with the hopes of getting myself hired somewhere as a web developer.
I started off working my way through Codecademy and FreeCodeCamp courses on my lunch breaks. I bought a few Udemy courses and began working on some small web dev projects but myself taught curriculum was not always well defined and although I was certainly learning quite a bit of JavaScript, web development and even a bit about data structures and algorithms, it felt at time like I didn’t have a lot to show for all my work. Although I did infrequently to junior web developers job postings I came across, I never was invited to so much as a phone interview during the first year of my self-education.
A turning point came in 2019 when I read a Medium article about Node.js library called Puppeteer. I had been working through some Udemy classes that focused on writing Node apps and had also some come across some YouTube tutorials for building desktop apps using Node and the Electron framework, but I had been feeling rather uninspired and had mostly just been following along video tutorials rather than designing and developing my own projects, but a light bulb flipped on when I read about Puppeteer, which is used to create web scraping and web automation apps.
I immediately envisioned how I could write an app that would automate some of my job duties. So I did. I presented it my company’s IT department and they were impressed. They set me up with one of the company’s senior developers and together over a period of seven months we created a .NET app that recreated and expanded upon the functionality of my Node app.
It was also around this time I started at OSU. Although I learned a ton in my quasi internship, my company required a degree before I’d be eligible to get hired full time as a developer. I decided to mostly put my job hunt on hold and focus on completing my degree. Now, with my graduation date less than 90s days off, I was eligible to apply to junior dev position that opened in my company, and I got it!
