Graduation Afterlife

5 months later I’ve graduated from the online software engineering bootcamp at Flatiron School. Now that I’m finished with the coding curriculum and technically graduated from the bootcamp I still have a ton of material to work through for my career prep track (as well as a whole new computer science curriculum) to work through leading up to fully diving into the job search.

I’ve met with my career coach a handful of time over the course of the past few weeks. We’ve revamped my resume, reviewed my online brand presence, and run through a mock cultural interview. Next up I’ve got a mock technical interview which I chose React for the topic for. My plan is to complete the required meetings for my Flatiron career prep track and officially be on the job hunt at the beginning of the new year.

Setting out onto my education on path after the bootcamp quickly let to me realizing that I need make sure that I am making efficient use of my time so that I’m making real progress. There are three main areas that I am spending my time on outside of work (in an unrelated field). The first area is things directly related to my job search, for example searching for potential employers, scouring LinkedIn, finding and attending meetups etc.

Second is building a personal website. I decided to use this small side project as an opportunity to learn a new technology and am using Gatsby, which is a static site framework for React. Gatsby is a great tool for building lightweight super-fast static websites, perfect for a portfolio website. My next blog post will be a deeper dive into using Gatsby to build a website.

The third area of work includes working on my main project(s). Due to time constraints, my projects built for my bootcamp coursework have plenty of room for improvement, specifically in the design aspect. Polishing my completed projects in terms of design and layout will give me a great chance to dive into CSS and UI/UX. Along with polishing my completed projects I plan on building a personal dashboard/time management tool for my next main project. Gotta keep that github green.