Hey, everybody! Onyx Neon has published a second book of mine! It is a tragicomedy called Out of Print, and it is set in a bookstore in the late 2000s during the popularization of the E-Reader.
You might be wondering, this blog and the last book were both about a coding boot camp. Is this book about coding too? No, it’s not. But it is about how technology and automation are changing every part of our lives, even sleepy, behind-the-times places like libraries and bookstores. And if you read Refactored, I think you’ll see a lot of similarities in Out of Print. It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you anxious, and it will get you to inspect your personal philosophy about work and what meaning it has in your life.
So, please, buy the book, review the book online, tell all your friends about the book, start book clubs to talk about it, form a cult where you make believe the characters are real and will answer your wishes, whatever. I appreciate it.
My book “Refactored: My Attempt at Breaking into Tech During the Rise of the Coding Bootcamp” has been released by Onyx Neon Press! It details me going from grocery store worker to software developer, guided by Tech Elevator’s boot camp. If you want to know the ins and outs of what happens at a coding boot camp, buy the book!
After graduating from Tech Elevator in April of 2019, I began outlining the experience using this blog to write a memoir. By the summer of 2020, I had a solid first draft. I started organizing my selling implements so that I could attract a literary agent and then possibly sell the book.
I had been through this process many times. I’ve been writing and trying to sell novels since I was twenty-five years old. Sometime around 2012, I secured a literary agent for a book I wrote and together we put together a package and tried to sell to one of the major publishers. We failed.
I persevered after that failure and wrote several more books between 2012 and 2019, when I started at Tech Elevator. But I was never able to hook a literary agent again. When this memoir based on the blog came together, I felt like I had something. Not only because I liked how it turned out, but because there is something of a built-in audience for the book. People who are interested in learning to code, people who are looking to switch careers, people who have wondered if they could do a coding book camp–this story is tailor-made for them.
So, I started the process once more. I wrote a query letter, I wrote a summary, I created a one-line description that captured the theme of the memoir. I researched literary agents and tailored my message specifically to them. I made spreadsheets of those that I would query and in what order I would query them. I put the work in.
Then I sent out a couple emails. Just five. My top five. My favorites. That’s when I lost control. I started checking my email every five minutes, I looked up the agents on Twitter, trying to see if they were actively reading their submissions, I thought about when I was going to get replies all the time.
After a few days of pointless stress, I reconsidered. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to run the gamut I had run so many times before. Maybe I wouldn’t try to sell this one. Maybe this one would just be for me.
I told this to a friend of mine, a book editor named Chastity, whom I used to work with and who had read one of my first drafts. Her reply was, “Oh, that’s too bad, because I’ve done work for a publisher who I think would really like this.”
Come again?
Chastity contacted the publisher, Onyx Neon, seeing if they were interested in a submission. And when they were, she sent a chapter. And when they were interested in that, she sent the book. Soon, a contract was signed, Chastity was hired as the editor, we have cover art, and are just waiting to set a release date. All without a literary agent.
Sometimes, it seems like the world is waiting for you to let go before giving you what you’re seeking.
I get this question a lot from people currently enrolled in coding boot camps or those wondering if they should take the plunge.
For the most part, I write scripts to automate software testing.
I am on a retail team for PNC and we are delivering a product that will be used internally by bankers. I work on a team with eight other people– six developers, a scrum master, and a product owner. There is a developer who is designated as the tech lead and there are two other developers who head the front end and back end of the project.
At the beginning of the project I was doing some straight development with Angular and learning how to build endpoints with Java, but at this stage the testing workload has really taken over. When a developer finishes a ticket, thereby adding new functionality to our project, I test that functionality, first manually by clicking through on my own, and then through writing code.
On the front end, I test using a software tool called Cucumber. You write scripts for Cucumber with a language called Gherkin (Yes, gherkins are little pickles. Ha, ha.) For every functionality of every page on our project, I write a test to mimic a user.
For the API calls, I use a similar software tool called Karate. Karate is also written in Gherkin, but is a lot more flexible, as it allows you to write JavaScript methods and other little tricks that Cucumber cannot do. For the most part, I make ‘get’ calls and post calls using Karate, but there are times when certain validation is needed and I break out the JavaScript.
I also attend all of my team’s ceremonies. When running Agile, teams call their meetings ceremonies. Our team has decided to run from Wednesday to Wednesday, rather than Monday to Friday. So, on Wednesday, we do our Sprint planning. Everyone looks at the tickets available and decides what type of workload they can handle. We assign tickets and begin the sprint. Every morning, we have a fifteen minute stand up where we briefly discuss what we will do that day and any problems blocking our work. On Thursday we have backlog refinement. We talk through the work that needs done in the upcoming sprints and create tickets to reflect that work. Friday and Monday are straight development days (Most of the team works from home on these days). Then, on Tuesday, we have a demo where everyone shows what they completed, not only to the team, but to stakeholders further up the bank’s food chain who are interested in our progress.
What I have just described are the bones of my job, but many other things arise during the week. For instance, I’ve come to realize that I will need a mock database to run my Karate tests against, so I am working with another team in PNC to get this accomplished. There is a long string of emails and meetings associated with getting the mock database built and this workload gets added with tickets to my sprint.
I don’t know if this sounds fun to you, but it is. Yes, there is stress, but working with a team has been an enjoyable experience. Everyone has a good sense of humor, works hard, and goes out for happy hour at least once a week.
I like to learn and I’m learning every day. The pace is not the ludicrous speed at which a boot camp runs, but now I can learn things, practice them, and retain them. In the six months that I’ve been at PNC, I’ve learned not only about programming, but how to get things done when working in a large company in a business software setting.
It has been three months since I graduated from a coding boot camp and started real employment as a software developer. The first week was pretty disorienting and frightening. I wasn’t sure I would be able to do it. But as the weeks rolled on, I got my feet under me and began to gain some confidence.
I am now on a team where I am in charge of functional testing and contributing to the front end, written in Angular.
Here are some tips of how to transform from a terrified boot camper to a confident (if still quite green) software developer:
Learn the vocabulary. Throughout my first day and first week, I was in meetings where I didn’t understand 70% of what was being said. This is no good. I couldn’t speak the language and I felt like I had no chance of catching up. But don’t fret. You know more than you think. Make a list of words, technologies, and team names. After each meeting, get on the Googles and on any type of internal website and look up each and every word you didn’t know. Jira? That’s just Trello. You knew that. You just didn’t know you knew it. As your vocabulary grows, so will your understanding of your place with the company.
Study tools before technologies. I was a .NET student at my boot camp. I was hired at a place that uses primarily Java. This freaked me out. I felt I had to dive headfirst into Java immediately, and that’s just what I did. I struggled terribly, and the reason I struggled was because I didn’t know how to use Eclipse, the IDE that is most popular with Java users. After I took a step back and learned Eclipse, I found my struggles with Java (which is basically the same as C#) became less onerous.
Make friends. I introduce myself to basically anyone who makes brief eye contact with me. If people know you, they’ll show you stuff. You need people to show you stuff.
Admit your weaknesses. This may come as a shock, but not every single professional software developer is a genius. It can be sort of surprising what senior level developers don’t know. So you shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit a lack of knowledge about anything. It’s expected. Ask the question if you need to ask the question.
Keep the boot camp mentality. You thought you were done? Fool. You’re not done. You’re never done. You have to keep pushing to learn and get better. The good thing is, the job most likely will focus you on one set of skills that you can begin to master, rather than a small peppering of everything under the sun, which is what you get in a boot camp.
You got the job. That’s great. Now, instead of paying someone to teach you, someone is paying you to learn. Just remain calm and keep learning.
So, that’s that. I may post a follow-up some months from now, addressing how my new skills performed in a real workplace, but other than that, this is the end of the blog. I’m glad to be done writing it, because it was a lot of work when combined with all the programming I had to do. But I’m also really happy I did it. It kept me focused and it forced me to reflect on each day and appreciate it for what it was, good or bad. And now that it’s over, I will always have a log of the time where I transitioned from being laid off to rebounding with new skills superior to my old ones. Having these thoughts all in one place, I’m able to look at the days spent at TE in one shot and say something that people don’t often say: I’m proud of myself.
Also, this is a record for anyone trying to research what a coding boot camp is like. One of the main problems I had when trying to decide if I should take this plunge was whether or not I could believe what was being written online. I mean, these are technical people trying to sell expensive classes to the non-techs. I was definitely suspicious and I had a difficult time becoming convinced. This blog could also be considered a service, I suppose, a day to day reporting on what you can expect (or SHOULD expect) at a coding boot camp.
And with that in mind, here are my final thoughts and recommendations.
This worked for me. Like, as well as it could possibly work. I had five months of self-study with coding before TE, and that’s it. I didn’t have the story of always wanting to be in tech, like many of the other students. I needed a better job and I thought that this was a good way to get one. It was. I make way more money now, I have a way nicer work environment, and I’m proud to tell people what I do.
Will this work for you? Well, I don’t know you. But I can tell you this: it won’t work for everyone. It’s really, really difficult. Most people probably think it’s difficult because you have to be smart to accomplish it. That’s not true. Yes, there is a degree of intelligence required to get in the door, but it’s not some lofty computer genius standard. I was a low ‘A’ high ‘B’ student in both high school and college. What got me through the boot camp was not intelligence, but grit. You have to be the type of person who will not quit and try hard day after day after day. You have to keep a positive attitude in the face of adversity. You have to be willing to be humbled. You will not be the smartest person in the room. That will be Tom. Or !Tom, maybe. If you can clear everything else out of your life, can afford to pay for the class, are at least sort of smart, and have deep endurance for work, then a coding boot camp might be right for you.
But not just any coding boot camp. I got my job through the matchmaking process at Tech Elevator. I applied to over 25 companies and all of my interviews (save one, which was for a company in Turtle Creek and would have been an hour and a half commute) came from the matchmaking process. The Pathway Program at Tech Elevator is legitimate and essential. Not all tech companies are ready to hire boot camp graduates. That’s a fact. You need someone advocating for you. As of today, four days after graduation, nearly half of the 32 students from Cohort 2 are hired. I’m not aware of one hire that wasn’t the fruit of Caitie and the Pathway Program. If the boot camp you’re looking at does not have something similar, you better have your own connections or it’s going to be a long road.
If you’d like to ask more exact questions about Tech Elevator or what I think concerning boot camps in general, feel free to email me. Otherwise, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed following my journey from retail to programming.
I have accepted an offer from PNC Bank to be a software developer associate. Callie, the talent acquisition recruiter from PNC emailed me on Tuesday saying that I should call her when I had the chance and that she would be free in the afternoon. I called her immediately. At 8:30am.
She wasn’t even at work yet, was walking around in downtown Pittsburgh, but still answered the phone. Since I called her four hours before she asked me to, she didn’t have the details in front of her, but she assured me that an offer was coming. In a text later on that day she said she would call me at 4:30. I waited impatiently and pretended to work on my capstone.
Marissa scheduled me a room so that I could have some privacy for the call. Callie called promptly at 4:31. She offered me the position, told me the details, and asked if I could start on April 29th. A day later (I waited just because I promised Jenny I would) I accepted.
Here are some of the differences between my employment before Tech Elevator in December and the position I will start at the end of April, after graduation.
I was working as a manager in a grocery store after being laid off from a long career at Barnes & Noble.
I often had to be there before 7am. I didn’t really mind this, but that early hour was sometimes tough.
I used heavy machinery and there was a high chance that I would eventually hurt myself.
I unloaded trucks through a dock. When it was cold I shivered, when it was hot, the place stunk of rotting food.
I had to wear a t-shirt that said the name of the grocery store everyday.
I was not what you would call a “cultural fit” with the other employees. We were friendly, but none of them were inviting me over for dinner.
I had one week of vacation that I only got after working for six months.
The health care was appreciated, but not great.
There was once an employee who used drugs in the bathroom and I had to help sort it out. (This was something of a turning point that reinforced the necessity to find a new job)
If someone wanted to know what my job was like, I told them that I was an accountant who worked in a room that smelled very bad.
At my new job at PNC:
I start with three weeks vacation
I work downtown, starting at 8:30 and can easily take public transit.
This past Friday was the last day of class for cohort 2 of Tech Elevator Pittsburgh. This doesn’t mean the course is over yet, we still have our final capstone which is allotted two weeks, taking us through the last ten days. But the fire hose of new information has been turned off.
What did we learn in twelve weeks? We learned Git, a version control technology. We learned, of course, the programming language C# and we learned how to leverage C# with Microsoft’s .NET Framework. We learned about the construction of databases and we learned SQL, the structured query language with which to speak to the databases. Then on to MVC, (Model, View, Control), an architecture strategy with which to build websites. Along with MVC we learned ASP.NET, a framework for developing web applications. We learned about sessions, and password hashing, and security. We learned about unit testing, integration testing, regression testing, and about Selenium. We learned Vanilla JavaScript. We learned Vue. We learned about the wealth of data to be found in API’s and how to fetch that data and display it on our applications. We learned and we learned and we learned.
But now it’s over. At least, until we get hired on somewhere. Then the education begins to flow once more (but, I’m told, at a significantly slower rate).
On that front, the job hunt has been both good and anxiety-riddled at the same time. I have one company that seems very interested in me. When speaking with Caitie after the Matchmaking event, they mentioned me by name as a candidate. I had a phone call with an HR representative when, as far as I can tell, no one else that interviewed with them did. I had a second interview that went smoothly and the main person in charge replied to my thank-you email saying that both she and the crew I interviewed with was impressed with me. That’s good. Also, according to Caitie, this company is looking to hire several TE students. Four? Six? Ten? We don’t know. I feel fairly confident that if the number of students offered jobs is above five, one of those five might be me. It could be me even if the number is smaller.
Now, it’s true that my timing expectations are a little out of whack. When my wife was looking for a job, some companies would take weeks or months to get back to her, even when the response was positive. I’ve only been looking for a job for three weeks.
However, things move faster in the tech industry and things move faster (historically speaking) at Tech Elevator. And with good reason. The company who had me in for the second interview had several other TE students in as well. Many of us would have accepted an offer on Friday, two days after our second interview. There are a slew of second interviews next week with different companies and it’s easy to imagine some of us receiving offers. It’s going to be really hard to not accept the first offer, even if we’d rather work somewhere else. There’s too much at stake. The companies should move fast if they have someone in mind, and Caitie, to her credit, reminds them of this often.
So, for now, I move forward with the final capstone, keep applying to jobs, and wait to hear some responses.
I had two more companies to interview with today. Two more opportunities to show off what I’ve learned and hopefully turn this whole venture into something very worthwhile.
The vibe was totally different this week than it was for the first round of matchmaking. Last week, the monks of Tech Elevator were pacing with furrowed brows and sweaty palms. There were still some nerves, to be sure. But it was nothing like the anxious hysteria of last Tuesday.
I think part of it was due to the fact that the second time around is always easier. We knew what to expect, how the conversations would go (generally), and how we would feel. I definitely felt calmer because I have a second interview coming up on Wednesday. I felt so calm, in fact, that I was worried that I might be too calm. I performed well while dealing with the nerves last week. What if, because I wasn’t completely terrified, I came off flat? One second interview is no cause for complacency.
But I think it went well. I was very interested in the second company I interviewed with and I believe they were interested in me. It also seemed as if they are looking to hire several people, so my expectations for a callback are high.
Justin, the campus director, addressed the entire squad today. We rarely get a speech from the head honcho–one welcoming soliloquy on the first day and the occasional off-the-cuff when Caitie was out of the building and a company was in for a showcase. Though brief, his talks have always had a clear and practiced structure to them. The point of this one: everyone needs to chill out.
The vibe at Tech Elevator since the matchmaking has been intense and strange. And it’s a vibe that Justin has experienced twice before. It’s not too bad yet, but the storm is brewing. The rumors are flying–somewhere between eight and ten people have heard back from companies in one way or another. Those who have not heard anything are doing their best to remain cool.
As Justin’s speech gave way to Caitie’s presentation on what to do follow-up-wise with the companies from matchmaking, Jason sat next to me with his eyes closed, breathing deeply. When there was a pause in Caitie’s presentation, I leaned over and asked, “Are you ok, buddy?”
He said he wasn’t. Why, he wondered, when a third of the group got a callback, he hadn’t. Had he said something wrong in the interviews? Did he screw them all up?
It made me feel terrible. The thing is, Jason is a really, really good coder. I hit him up for help all the time. He’ll certainly be snatched up by a company, and when he does, he’ll be extraordinary, particularly for a junior level programmer. But I know it doesn’t seem like that to him now.
All of us are experiencing more than our fair share of anxiety this week. Those of us fortunate enough to get an early callback had some of that burden lifted from our shoulders. The bad thing is, that weight was put directly onto the shoulders of our comrades.
From Retail to Programming 