A Recap of my job search journey after a bootcamp graduation in April 2021.

It’s been 16 weeks, 4 months, since I now graduated from Flatiron School Full Stack Software Engineering bootcamp. In 3 months, it will be a year since I decided to take a big step and enroll with Flatiron in order to switch career from the restaurant industry to the coding world.

I have had a lot of ups and downs during these 4 months, but today I got a nice email from a company I applied for on 11/8 letting me know that I successfully passed the online assignments and am now moving on to the next phase! Super excited as this is the 1st time that I am moving to the next phase, and really motivating for the future.

Each week, I have to meet some requirements in order to stay in the money back guarantee program with Flatiron School. I have to follow a tight schedule as I am working 30 hours a week as a server and also taking a Google UX design online certificate.

• Contacts: Each week, I am trying to follow the minimum requirement of reaching out to 8 people in order to build my network. By doing so, I am getting very good advice from experimented software engineers or new grads who could get recent advice on how to land this first job. I am very grateful for those who took the time to answer me, jump on a phone call with me and even give me feedback about my resume or projects. I love this community where a lot of people don’t forget that we all started someday not knowing a lot and having someone giving us an opportunity to learn and prove ourselves.

My biggest advice would be not to be shy, you have nothing to lose by reaching out to someone and you would be surprised of how many people are willing to help you.

• Blog Posts: Each week, I have to write a blog. I have to say that this is the hardest part of my program. It is challenging to keep ideas and not repeat myself. What I like about writing blogs is that it allows you to express yourself and review what you have to learn during the week, or a project that I worked on.
• GitHub: Lastly, I have to do at least 5 commits a week. As you can see, I started slow, trying to meet the requirements, but realized that this is the most important. I created lots of projects using React, and lately I have been following tutorials on how to create clones. I created a facebook-clone, tinder-clone that I deployed with Firebase. It was nice seeing people from my social network, colleagues or friends interacting with my apps and adding new posts like on my facebook-clone. I am currently trying to work on a youtube-clone, this time by adding a lot of functionalities myself. I would love to create a couple more clones in order to build my portfolio, but I understand that I should not spend too much time on doing this as I am following tutorials and not creating something myself.

On top of all this, I am also practicing my algorithms on HackerRank, Leetcode and watching videos about it.

I am crossing my fingers that this company will give me the opportunity to work for them, learn from other software engineers and use my abilities to improve the experience of millions, billions of users and see my work in the real world.