What does a journey look like for you? For me, it has been an ongoing journey that started 2+ years ago. Every journey needs a good beginning, and mine is quite literally the opposite of what you would call a "good" beginning. I was stagnant, listless, bored, and empty: words that could easily describe a long wait at the DMV. I only chose my major out of necessity, not out of desire, passion, or ambition. My job selection was no different, randomly selecting job applications and going through the daily motions. The only passions I had to cling to were my love for drawing, watching anime, reading manga, and listening to music.
It seemed like this would be how the rest of my life panned out, but there was no self-realization regarding this. Not yet, anyway. Turns out, all I needed was a chance to self-reflect and analyze my life choices, and Co-Vid was my golden opportunity. I had finally escaped, and I felt free to re-examine myself and started finding ways to challenge my current career path. I realized I felt unsatisfied and frustrated at my current state, and I needed to take action to change this. So I took a risk, a big one: I quit my job to search for part-time jobs. It was time to start taking control of my life, and I had to ask myself: what career field do I want to pursue? I had always been interested in computers and decided to give that an opportunity. My initial thought process was to apply for an online college to get my CS Bachelor's degree. However, I quickly realized the price was not worth it for me, and I dropped out as fast as I could.
I moved on to the self-taught path, where I found myself trapped in what is famously known as "tutorial hell" among developers.
From tutorial to tutorial, I jumped and leaped and tripped and dropped. Nothing was sticking, I felt overwhelmed and lost, and I had no idea where the start line was. That was until I discovered 100 Devs. At first, I was suspicious. A 100% free training agency that had nothing but good reviews? It seemed too good to be true. It had to be a scam, this couldn't be true, could it?
100Devs
Would you be surprised if I told you 100Devs' primary focus was not to teach coding, but to help people in the community get their first job in the tech field? This is because the current organizer of 100Devs Leon Noel believes that coding is a skill that anyone can learn on their own, either through tutorials, documentation, or free online resources; however 100Devs provides something those resources don't, and that is a community.
A sense of community is so much stronger than you might imagine. It gives you the strength to move forward and never give up, knowing there are many others besides you taking the same journey you are or have taken the same journey before. The emotional support helps lift you, as you return the favor to those who may be struggling as well. Having many experienced members be a part of this community as well also provided a great platform for technical help whenever you were struggling on that front.
It was a great starting point for me. 100 Devs gave me a sense of focus and it set a solid foundation for my engineering career. Giving the support and resources to ease my way into the "seemingly intimidating" nature of coding, while providing an interconnecting pathway from multiple coding languages, tools, and libraries, 100 Devs was the perfect start of my tech journey.
Non-Profits, Meetups, Oh My!
After leaving 100 Devs, I was a bit unsure of what direction to take next. There are so many libraries, languages, and tools online to learn. Since I already set the base foundations of my coding knowledge, I was able to find the next steps of my journey much faster compared to when I started it. I slowly added more tasks to my daily schedule to prevent myself from burning myself out, like learning React, re-implementing my old project with React, and optimizing my React code. I also started planning for the next day with what I wanted to accomplish and changed how I planned out my day according to what I accomplished in the past.
Once I settled into a consistent schedule, I started to seek out meeting new people in the tech career field. I came across New York Code and Coffee, a meetup group that is organized bi-weekly where people from the tech field make new friends and exchange conversations. I reached out to multiple people online to not only become more active in the tech online community but to also meet new people and potentially make new online friends! I also started seeking developer experience even if it was unpaid experience, and I came across Linguistics Justice League and Betheli9ht Foundation, where I volunteered as a developer for a good amount of time.
I was finally at a point in my life where I could confidently say that I was happy with my career path. Although I did not have a paid job yet, I enjoyed learning new concepts, building and iterating on projects, solving problems, and experimenting with code syntax. While I was satisfied with what I had accomplished up to this point, I was still hungry to see myself improve and challenge my skills to a different height. And that's when I joined Gridiron Survivor, the perfect environment to try new things and push myself to my upper limitations.
Gridiron Survivor
I didn't find Gridiron Survivor, Gridiron found me. It all started with a Twitter post, where said group truly began its origins. Shashi Lo Senior UX Engineer at Microsoft and current team leader of Gridiron Survivor, presented us with an opportunity for a product, where his friend wanted to have an application built to customize his football survivor games. Instead of creating the app on his own, Shashi suggested the idea of incorporating agile methodologies into the project to make it as similar to a corporate environment as possible while keeping it a safe environment. A few of us, me included, expressed our interest in the project and it was there where our beginnings for Gridiron Survivor began.
The flow of the project timeline was presented, showcasing how each phase would represent the important components of the overall application's development and production. We were then tasked with going on our own to research various technology languages, libraries, and tools to determine which would serve the best for our specific application and why. We then had to present our findings to the entire team, receive feedback, finalize our research documentation, and re-presented our research.
It was then that I had an epiphany thanks to Shashi pointing it out while we talked one-on-one. I realized that my time researching, organizing, and writing my documentation was fun and interesting. Noticing this, Shashi decided to pivot me to be the Documentation/Technical Writer for the application, while also allowing me to cross-function when the project needed me to.
I immediately started to familiarize myself with the world of technical writing, reading various articles and blogs talking about the writing conventions and thought process that goes into writing technical documentation. I then started going through existing technical documentation to receive inspiration from them and learn to differentiate good documentation from bad documentation. It was then that I came across Vincent Ge, who at the time was Appwrite's technical writer. I requested a coffee chat with him, where I was able to not only become closer to him but also receive sage advice regarding how I should approach writing technical writing and his thought process when writing technical documentation.
During our conversation, I expressed my ongoing journey to find a job in the technology career field. Once it was publically posted and available by Appwrite, Vincent forwarded me the link to the Appwrite Technical Writer Intern position. Thanks to my time with Gridiron Survivor, I was able to demonstrate my work ethic, collaboration, teamwork abilities, my ability to talk in front of others about what I accomplished, and my technical documentation skills by building in public. I also was blessed with amazing people who were willing to send in strong referrals of their free will.
The Next Chapter
I don't know what the future holds for me, but I know what I want to accomplish tomorrow. Day by day, I keep moving forward as I try to survive in the game we all know as life. Having accomplished a big milestone in my life by becoming a Technical Writer Intern at Appwrite, I hope to continue accomplishing great things throughout my life and be happy. And I cannot wait to see what the next chapter of my life has in store for me.