Flatiron Graduate 1 to 2 mo. Update

Written 08/20/2021:

It’s been nearly a month since graduation.

Each graduate’s experience is unique but each of us share a common experience of persevering through difficult challenges, and through trying with everything have, we’ve come out the other side with new knowledge and skills that will kick start our entry into the world of programming and software development.

Through some unexpected and well received coincidence, I was able to find a paid temporary contract the Monday after graduating. This, for the record, is very rare because the majority of bootcamp graduates spend an estimated 2 to 6 months before being matched with an employer. This position actually came from a classmate of mine who is widely known in our Flatiron cohort as the mango dealer.

I’ve spent about a month working here and it’s almost felt as if bootcamp has never ended. It wasn’t a week before I had to refer to online documentation to understand the difference in syntax between React and React native, which is used for mobile applications. For you coders out here, instead of using familiar html tags or divs, all of a sudden these did not exist and each rendered element had to be framed with a ‘view.’ I faced another challenge when we began to pick up firebase to host our chat messaging, and simply following documentation or furiously browsing stack overflow wasn’t enough to get me over the hump. Thankfully we were able to reach out to developers as a resource who walked us through setting up our application using Expo, which is what we used to build our android app.

It’s unreal seeing how much I’ve learned the past four months from my instructors at Flatiron, my classmates, and friends who have also gone through bootcamp. It’s truly a community effort, and cooperation that allows us to reach new heights

It’s now September 4th, and time has sure flown right by. Since then we’ve been able to integrate auth using Firebase, and temporarily test our mobile application before deployment by hosting our rails server via a tunnel. We were also inspired to learn more about data science after attending a workshop hosted by Flatiron. We’ll delve further into this topic to help with our recommendation algorithm by using SVD and gradient descent for our rating system.

All to say it’s been quite a month and I’m thankful to be in an environment where I can constantly learn and hone new skills.