lawyerwhocodes-blog

[lawyerwhocodes-blog]

Is coding as a career change just hype?

I have been interested in coding, programming, and even had a computer science major for a bit during my undergraduate years, ultimately settling on political science and then moving on to law school.  During the past two decades I never quite gave up learning to code and often flirted with the idea of gravitating towards the field professionally. 

Recently, I completed a coding school program (I won’t refer to it as a boot camp anymore because it does not have that mentality) with a focus on Java, Spring Boot, and MySQL. I applied to a number of jobs and quickly realized that there just wasn’t a lot of interest in what I had to offer. I had applied to a variety of positions and even lower paying jobs to get practical experience as a developer. 

During this time one of my code school colleagues reviewed my resume.  He had spent several years as a tech recruiter before deciding to try to make the move towards software engineering. A couple of things that he said sort of stuck out to me. First, I needed to remove things that would give an indication of my age. At 45 I don’t consider myself old, especially in the legal field. I understand that there is some documented ageism in the tech world, but I was bothered by the fact that I was suppose to hide, well...me! 

The next thing that was interesting was being told that I should put a lot of small technical terms in white font at the bottom of my resume so that the program scanning resumes would pick up on these terms. I think this borders on the ridiculous. It reminds me of the old CSS trick of text-indent: -10000px to hide plain text off the page so that it could still be picked up by search engines, but not visible on the screen. 

This definitely makes me question whether or not this field is a good fit for me. I am not interested in start-up type hours or pay structures. I think age brings with it a sense of making sure that things are done correctly and ethically.  Essentially as you get older, you do ask about the downside to things. It’s not a bad thing.  

I am still not entirely sure that it makes sense for me to consider a career change, but that doesn’t mean that it is still not an exciting field. I am still very happy to serve in a mentor role and help people get through the coding program. I also have some projects that I want to work on individually.  

My final thought is this, the “learn to code” movement needs to take some time off and reevaluate its purpose. Looking at my journey in learning about coding and software engineering, I would say that it is really like being a lawyer. There’s money to be made, but don’t do it for the money. If you don’t enjoy it, then there will be some hard years ahead in your career. Instead of “learn to code” why can’t we focus on “learn to problem solve” or “learn to communicate effectively” or perhaps even “learn to lawyer”. The point is learning to code for the sake of doing the next “it thing” has been very unproductive for a lot of people. If you want to “learn to code” be interested in code.  

[lawyerwhocodes-blog]

Coding Boot Camp Grad (Soon...)

I am in the last week of my experience at Promineo Tech’s back end developer program.  It’s been 18 weeks of learning Java, MySQL, Spring Boot, Thymeleaf (on my own, but I want to try to make a complete final project), Git, and the Command Line.  My final project is in a good spot.  There are still some errors, but at least I know I am heading in the right direction to fix those errors.  

Fortunately, when I turn in the final project, my time at Promineo Tech is not done.  I am going to be serving as a mentor for their future cohorts.  Additionally, I have been able to secure a spot utilizing available funding through Indiana to attend the Web Development boot camp through Eleven Fifty Academy in Indianapolis starting this November. 

[lawyerwhocodes-blog]

Challenge of the day

Trying to explain the concepts and when to use interfaces in Java programming was a challenge in my new mentoring life. Definitely a very abstract (pun intended) concept to try to help someone grasp!

Here is a pretty good article on explaining the basics of how to use an interface (and if you are new to Java, my recommendation is to not dive too deep into why just yet):

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/java-interfaces-explained-with-examples/

[lawyerwhocodes-blog]

I’m the kind of person who feels bad if I’m not constantly productive - but especially in this current pandemic, we can’t expect ourselves to be productive every single day. It’s not realistic, and it’s not fair on us. 🌱

- It’s okay if you aren’t productive every day

[lawyerwhocodes-blog]

Git and GitHub - F#$%@!#

Using Git is one of those things that everyone says is super important in the world of professional programmers. Quite honestly, I don’t disagree.  That doesn’t mean, it still isn’t a pain to learn.  Have faith new programmers, even people that have been doing this for a bit, still forget how to properly set up a remote connection!  It’s even more embarrassing when doing it during a mentor session.  

[lawyerwhocodes-blog]

Senior projects got me like

[lawyerwhocodes-blog]

Mentoring

There is no better way to learn to code then by helping someone else learn to code.