Zero to Hero : How I got hired 3 months after writing my first line of code.
Tags: webdev, react
Published: 2020-11-09 17:25:58

Hi, my name is Jaice, I am a 22 year old kid living in Central NJ. I live with my fiance and my 18 month old daughter along with my fiances extended family. My fiance nannies for their two children because COVID has kept them out of school.

Before COVID-19 hit the world and things changed, I used to be a traveling salesman and I was in the process of starting a company that I was hoping would drastically change the quality of life my family has come to know. I made decent money but we had terrible financial habits. When we decided to bunker down and quarantine, our savings dwindled quickly and we knew that something had to change.

We both brainstormed for hours, thinking of ideas and things that we could do in order to pay for things like our cell phone bill, our daughters diapers, etc. The list of things in our shared document almost baffles me when I look at it today, we were really reaching a few times.

Long story short, after talking about a few different ideas, we settled on something we thought would work. Development.

Now I know it sounds crazy, development isn't a get rich quick scheme by any means, but I was confident that I could get it done because I had been sold the idea by a coding boot camp, Lambda school. Silly me for falling for a trap, but fortunately I chose a cheaper and in my opinion higher quality route and I went with Thinkful.

I won't talk much about Thinkful here because this isn't a school review, but for those of you who would like to know about my experience, feel free to DM me!

After enrolling in their flex program on money that I had borrowed from everyone around me I started applying for jobs. I figured what the heck, if someone responds, so be it, I can get experience and learn what it is like interviewing for a dev job.

While waiting for responses and continuing to apply, I started the thinkful curriculum and made it all the way to about the halfway mark in about 2 months, I had a good understanding of JS, HTML and CSS and I was starting to feel confident, which came with perfect timing.

I heard back from a surprising amount of companies, some of whom were even looking to fill mid level positions. One response stood out to me because it seemed like the company had reasonable expectations, competitive pay, strong publications written about their business model and they stood for a good cause.

The response said roughly the following, hey Jaice, we like your resume, you have no experience with react, no dev experience at all actually, so complete this assessment.

It was a algorithmic interview, which I bombed, but as the true salesman would, I persisted and asked for additional assessments and tests so that I could better prove my worth to the company.

They sent over a react challenge and on that day I wrote my first line of react. It felt great, the system made sense, everything was working great and I built out a little response web application to dynamically render grids of images from an api and apply filters to them using dynamic css variables, the user could specify grid sizing, image width, opacity and grey scale.

Looking back on it I would have probably done some things differently, but they were impressed enough with my code that they extended a one month contract to test the waters with me. Which, of course, I graciously accepted.

When I started work I was getting paid as a contractor and I wasn't entirely sure how things would work out so I kept learning aggressively and I kept putting in the required work to make sure that I was growing as a developer and becoming more hire able with time.

Four weeks went by, I had new interviews set up expecting the end of my contract, I had worked on tons of leetcode and then out of nowhere, my contract manager hopped on a video call and extended a full time offer.

I was shocked, I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. I thought I was going to make a couple thousand bucks and be on my way, but here I am now, working as a full time front end software engineer making more money than I could ever have imagined with a company that I love and people that I have a ton of fun working with.

I am grateful for the amazing amount of support that the coding community has offered me over the last few months and I am proud to be apart of such a great group.

Thank you for reading,

Sorry if things are brief, I tried to hit the main points so that this story wasn't two hundred thousand words.

Jaice de Celis