First Week of the Job Search

I’m at the end of week one of my job search, the part of the boot camp that I’ve been most nervous about. I’ve never felt particularly comfortable networking and interviewing, and the career services path at Flatiron emphasizes networking as key in the job search. That said, this is definitely the most important step for me, and I haven’t gotten to where I am now feeling comfortable every step along the way.

As with my last post, I’m having trouble coming up with a topic. Since the last project, I haven’t picked up a ton in the way of new technical skills — I’ve mostly been working on preparing for the job search. So I’m thinking I’ll start out talking about how I’m planning to schedule out my time during the job search and plans for future projects.

Throughout the course at Flatiron, we had classes at a particular time in the day and had a certain number of lessons / labs that needed to be completed to meet the end of week goals. We pretty much had a daily schedule planned out for us. Post-graduation, I’ve got to plan out my own schedule to make sure I’m staying productive — networking, applying and learning.

I’ve never been super great at saying I need to do exactly this thing at this particular time, but better at blocking off periods of time that I need to get a particular type of work done during. I’m planning to take this approach and do something of a morning / afternoon type of schedule. In the morning, I’m going to knock out the things I feel more uncomfortable with — networking, applying to jobs and exercising (COVID has really taken its toll without hockey). In the afternoon, I can focus on study / coding related things — mostly working on projects, coding challenges on leetcode, and learning new skills. I think this will be pretty effective. Get the things I’m not great at done early in the day so I can reward myself working on things that are more intuitive.

So this week, along with everything else, I’ve started creating my next project, which is a rework of my fantasy hockey Rails project. It’s going to be pretty fun moving this into React, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the final product. Of the projects at Flatiron, this is the one I enjoyed the most.

My big focus during this rewrite is going to be testing. While we had an introduction to testing at Flatiron, there were only one or two lessons that we really dove into them, and we never actually wrote our own tests. Seeing a lot of jobs focus on test-driven development, and hearing other grads bring up learning testing in their blogs, I think this is something that’ll be really good to focus on. So far I’ve decided on using RSpec for the Rails testing, and Jest for React. I’ve only written a few tests so far in RSpec for the User model, but I can see how it’s going to be very beneficial over the long run. I’ll try to dive a bit more into this next week and make it the focus of my next post.

So yeah, next week: RSpec and Jest!