I'm staring down the barrel of graduation from Techtonica's 2024h2 cohort of software engineer apprentices on Friday, and not for the first time since I started my coding journey, I find myself asking, alright, where do I go from here?
It's crazy to feel like I'm at yet another starting line when I started coding almost nine years ago now during a once weekly high school class on Java, none of which I remember now. Over the years I've messed around with "coding" various virtual pet forum posts, customized my teenage era tumblr theme, and gotten stuck in brightly colored "learn to code!" tutorial hell too many times to count. I finally decided to buckle down and get serious about learning software development in the fall of 2021. My post pandemic job hunt had reached what felt like a new low, and I was desperate for any sort of job that could be done remotely.
I spent the two years of college that I attended telling myself that I was firmly an arts person and, furthermore, that STEM careers and the arts don't blend. So when I uncovered a genuine love for coding years after discarding it as "that thing I messed around with as a kid", I was both surprised and delighted. It took me a solid month to slog through what felt like every beginner tutorial ever to be posted to the internet. At the end of that month, I found the magic that is The Odin Project, and the rest is history.
I'd love to make a separate post about The Odin Project and all it's done for me on my coding journey, so I won't say too much more about it here, but suffice it to say that it was more or less my world for two years. I was hungry for knowledge, and TOP gave me far more than I was getting from the typical "what's a variable" type tutorials. By the time I started looking at apprenticeships and bootcamps, I had built a few basic sites, had a rough grasp of OOP, and was excited to discover that learning a new language was not all that difficult after I had JavaScript and Ruby under my belt. I applied to a number of barrier-to-entry type programs, many of which I was rejected from or whose programs fell through, but which gave me valuable interview experience.
This is where Techtonica comes in. When I saw that each cohort only admitted about a dozen members, I figured I had pretty much no chance. Still, it couldn't hurt to apply, right?
When I made it through round two of applications I was ecstatic, and even when the program began in earnest and it became clear that the learning curve was going to be much steeper than I was used to, I was still super excited. I distinctly remember the point when the program's curriculum crossed over from things I knew and remembered from TOP to things I had no knowledge of at all, and the equal fear and delight that that brought me.
Over the course of the program, I've completed half a dozen mock interviews, many pair programming sessions, and thirteen projects. This includes my first ever full stack applications, my favorite of which is my final project, Kennelkit. I'm incredibly proud of what I and my cohort mates done at Techtonica, and extremely grateful to the staff and volunteers, particularly my mentor.
But all that aside--graduation is on Friday. What happens now?
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure. I don't know yet whether I've been placed with one of our partner companies, and if I haven't been, I need to start my job hunt. If I have been, I'll need to prepare for onboarding in my first ever role as a junior developer. Both possibilities seem pretty daunting. I've dedicated today to working on my resume, and I've got a few connections to reach out to over coffee. I have plans to rework my portfolio site later in the week. I've also started the hunt for open source projects to contribute to, since I want to improve my ability to work on a team. If you have any suggestions, definitely leave a comment to let me know!
I'm not sure where I'll end up after this, but I'm excited to find out.
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