Post Makers - Week 1
Tags: github, jobhunt, schoolsout, newcareer
Published: 2020-03-20 16:52:15

Today marks a week since finishing at Makers. It is a strange feeling, both joy and sadness. Joy that I made it to the end of the course, successfully in fact! But sadness that I will no longer be meeting up with my cohort daily, playing table tennis and brainstorming coding ideas and projects. What makes it an even stranger time is the spread of Covid-19. It led to the final Demo Day being cut short with no outsiders present, and has led to moderate panic in London. Train stations are closing, shops are running out of supplies and travel abroad has been banned. Fingers crossed this is all over soon, as selfishly, it also means many companies have frozen their recruitment, with a great deal of companies making workers redundant due to the closure of business. 

This means this week has felt strange - I was never expecting for the developer job of my dream to fall out of the sky and onto my lap 3 days after graduating, however it now looks more likely that it will take a number of months, rather than weeks until this saga is over and I land that dream job.

To make myself busy the last week, i first made my Github CV, a linkedIn account and a Hunter job tracker profile. I then have spent half of the week meticulously going through my old repo’s and adding README’s, fixing failing tests and deleting dead code. I have found this strangely enjoyable for a few reasons. Firstly I got to laugh at myself. Ok it was only me 3 months ago, but after flicking through some of my first repos, i had many chuckles at this guys code on the screen. This emotion quickly turned into pride as i really and properly realised just how far i had come. 

I started to notice obvious mistakes, bad practises and went on a refactor rampage. Things i assumed i was solid at, and completed to a high standard, quickly were reduced to one or two lines. Tests started to look green, and pictures started to appear in README’s. This all satisfied my OCD greatly, and gave me a Github portfolio i am proud to show off now (Go on - check it out!)

The rest of my time was spent applying to my first jobs. Makers runs a Jobfair once a month where they get partners to visit and pitch their roles, you then have a Q&A session, followed by an in-house application. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and the on site school being shut, this was done remotely over Zoom, but was still productive and exciting to see.

I watched the presentations from the comfort of my own living room, made notes, and typed out my questions. I then spent the next day reflecting on which roles and which companies were a correct fit for me, and got to work on completing the applications. It’s a small step, but I have not applied to a job in over 7 years, i forgot how hard it is to speak about yourself and sell sell sell!

Anyway i will spend the rest of the weekend now on a small React project I am working on, it seems that most of the jobs that are currently out there involve React on the front end so can’t be bad to get a headstart!   I will use this end to for once wish the world luck, this virus has already killed over 10,000 people globally, let’s hope these restriction measures will help with the decline of new cases. 

Until next week,

David