Airline pilot to web dev
Tags: career, beginners, webdev, codenewbie
Published: 2021-03-04 16:12:07

For the last 9 years of my life I have been an airline pilot. Flying for various airlines all around the world. This career had me based in the USA, the Caribbean, Romania, and now finally in Germany. In my 20s the ebbs and flows of the industry and the constant change of geographical location was fun and exciting. I am 30 now and when the industry hits a trough it feels like you are stuck in a toxic relationship. And believe me, this corona pandemic gave the industry a BIG trough. 

I think I read somewhere that as of this moment, beginning of 2021, there are about 17 to 18 thousand pilot jobs threatened or already lost in Europe alone. I am part of that statistic. This is the first blogpost I have ever written in my life and I write it incase anyone in a similar situation to me needs a guiding light. 

March 2020 when corona was making its way in Europe, I luckily had the foresight that this might be an issue for my career in the future. The pandemic coupled with a recently broken collarbone gave me a lot of free time as a pilot and I used it investigating different career paths to consider incase flying would not be possible anymore. Being in a specialised career such as an airline pilot limits a lot of your hard transferable skills so re-educating and re-inventing my self was the only option. Luckily, there are a lot of soft transferable skills which are quite valuable from the aviation industry. (Eg. conflict management, risk assessment, safety management, learning new technologies...)

The tech world came up as a pretty obvious industry to get into due to its prominence and not necessarily requiring a degree in it. 

Next step, where to begin? In today's world you are bound to have friends involved in tech some way or another. I contacted a handful of my friends in the industry and probed them about different aspects of the industry and quickly realised that there are many avenues to go down. Google became my best friend as I searched for and completed survey after survey to find out which is the best track and language to get into. As a pilot I am very risk averse and prefer a solid plan of action. www.codecademy.com has a fairly nice sorting quiz for anyone looking. 

Speaking of Codecademy, I think if coding is brand new to you as it was for me, I think Codecademy is a great place to start. Their basic intro material is free and you only have to pay if you want to dive deeper. So it was a great way to test out the languages that appealed to me. Around this time (April 2020), Codecademy was offering free premium memberships for anyone who had been furloughed and were at risk for losing their jobs, which was SUPER nice of them. I took advantage of this opportunity and dove deeper into Javascript. 

Trough out 2020 I went back and forth with learning Javascript and was debating wether it was for me. Apart from the console and abusing `console.log()` there was not much visual feedback and gratification. My interest dwindled but of course since I had done a lot of research on coding, a lot of my targeted instagram and facebook ads were from that field. One day, I saw one from "Techlabs" (www.techlabs.org) in Berlin, that was offering a FREE bootcamp for web dev, UX/UI, data science, or Artificial Intelligence. I thought "free? must be a scam...but I will go along with it until they ask for my credit card info". Turns out, it wasn't a scam! It was a bootcamp hosted by a group of volunteers who provide the material and offer all sorts of mentoring and workshops while you self study through the material. 

Remember how I said I was losing interest when I was just learning Javascript? One day, into this bootcamp and I was hooked. I am a visual person, and before touching javascript most bootcamps will go into HTML and CSS first, which gives you a lot more visual gratification and the feeling of creating something. Only once you learn HTML and CSS first do you realise the power of what Javascript can do and it gets even more addicting! 

It was about a 3 month bootcamp where the first half was self study and in the second half I was paired with members from other tracks to create a final project. I made a pitch which got selected and a team of 6 others and my self created 'My Sports' - an event creation platform specifically aimed to match users into teams for various sports. Users are matched based on search criteria and filters and then are able to communicate in an integrated event chatroom to discuss details.

I am pretty proud of it. You can visit the source code here:
https://github.com/TechLabs-Berlin/My-Sports

and the deployed version here:
https://blooming-ridge-65166.herokuapp.com/login

Let me know what you think!

Fast forward to February 2021, and I have completed the bootcamp. I get an internship as a front end react developer (although my tasks are more CSS heavy). I am a volunteer front end react-native developer (this one is a lot more javascript/typescript) for a charity organisation. And I am also a volunteer as a track lead at the same bootcamp that offered me this life changing opportunity. Life is good and I am pretty satisfied with what the future looks like. Ive got my first two full time employment interviews next week and hopefully that goes well. Please leave your interview advice in the comments!! :D 

If you have anymore questions about my journey please feel free to ask! If you have any advice please feel free to share! Follow me on instagram @shneildareal or find me on Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashneil-sakhrani-10645b1b/ if you want to connect!