Trials in Snake Charming

So the SAS have a saying.  “Who Dares Wins”.  There were so many times I was afraid during my journey to break into development.  I was afraid no one would hire me without a degree or full time professional experience.  I was afraid that taking a break to do consulting would make it more difficult to get a decent full-time sales job if this didn’t work out.  There were a lot of valid concerns surrounding this undertaking.  But I dared to move forward anyway.

I dared to move forward because of what I stood to win.  A career doing something I love.  A more stable financial future for my family.  A way to connect on a deeper level with my many friends in STEM careers.  Many of the best things in life, the things worth striving for, carry a risk.  Hence, “Who Dares Wins”.

I am happy to report that as of January 29, 2015, I can say that I won.  I landed a position as a Test Automation Engineer at a consulting firm called Vision Technology Services.  I am contracted to an awesome company called Roadnet Technologies out of Towson, Maryland.  I am working with a great mentor named Paul writing automated tests in C# for their top-tier routing software for last mile carriers.

It still hasn’t completely sunk in that I’ve “made it”, and more importantly I realize that this is the beginning of my journey, not the end.  I do know that I feel like a huge weight has been lifted off of my chest.  This is the first weekend in years that I’ve been able to truly relax, that I’ve allowed myself to be optimistic about the future.  I feel like everything is going to be okay as long as I stay true to what brought me here, namely my passion and eagerness to learn.

As I promised in my last post, a postmortem of my job hunt will be coming soon.  I have plenty of advice to give on both things I did right and things I did wrong.  But for now, I want to thank the people who got me here…

Jody Brookover, you took me seriously when I told you what I was going to do, and you were supportive throughout my entire journey.  Thanks again for the mock interview experience!

Scott Becker, if it wasn’t for the crash course in C# you gave me I wouldn’t have been able to meet the deadline on the test project Roadnet gave me to do.  Given that I got the job, I’d say I owe you one.

Brian Carr, thank you for being my front end mentor.  You are the reason funny pages looks and acts like a legitimate web page.

Dominique Carr, my wife and partner.  You never stopped believing in me no matter what I wanted to do.  Your love and support banished my fears.

Randy and Lori Carr, my mother and father.  You helped my family through this in more ways than I can list here.  Thank you so much.

Eric Palakovich Carr, my sensei, my Yoda, my harshest critic and staunchest ally.  I’ll never forget the many, many hours of valuable time that you chose to invest in me (and thanks also to Julie for sharing her husband).  I honestly would not have made it here without you.

And finally Randy and Tori, my beautiful children.  You are the reason I dare to do better.

It’s been a month since my last update!  The holiday season flew by and was full of last minute job interviews, some of which I am starting to continue the process with now.  So much has happened I don’t know where to begin.  I’ll do a postmortem of my job hunt very soon but for now I’ll leave you with this.

I wrote my first working php program!  It’s a simple conversation program that gives four different responses depending on input.  I got to scratch the surface of php’s rich string handling functions.  They made writing a function like this super efficient.

Depending on where I end up at the end of my job search I may end up writing a lot of php so this was a great exercise! Regarding the subject line, LAMP refers to the common development stack of Linux, Apache, MySql, and Php.

Hello friends! I realized it’s been a couple weeks since my last post and decided to take a breather from my job hunting tasks. I interviewed with a great ad firm in the DC area this past week and met some really cool guys. A big shout out to Kevin, Chris and Heather for your hospitality and interest in yours truly.

I was lucky enough to put a lot of work in on jquery and ajax over the last few days. Part of my interview was an onsite code challenge where I basically had to write a url shortener like bit.ly, and incorporate ajax. Ajax lets you submit data to other urls in your app without refreshing the webpage. It’s great for submitting form data. It is still a work in progress but you can see it in my github repo at https://github.com/HamboneWilson.

So I had my first technical interview today!  I had to share a text editor during a webex and write python code.  The first problem was to find the first instance of string “x” inside of string “y” and return it’s index location.  I had one small error that would have become obvious when I went to run it, but other than that I nailed it.

The second was a good bit tougher.  I had to take a given integer and determine it’s value as an index in the Fibonacci sequence.  Again, I did pretty well aside from a couple small errors that were easy to adjust.  Gil if you are reading thank you for the interview!  I really enjoyed talking with you and I appreciated the advice you gave me to tighten up my code.

It’s been a great week for me readers! Amazon Web Services applied credit to my account and cancelled out all fraudulent charges. On top of that, my resume and GitHub went live on all major job boards on Sunday and I’ve been drowning in attention from recruiters and hiring managers ever since. I’ll keep you all posted as I move through the interview process and will eventually ad a new section called “Ready to look for a job?” that will give helpful tips and cautionary tales from my experience hunting for my employed dev position. Hard work really does pay off!

What getting chased by recruiters this week feels like.

So far so good with AWS support.  They have begun the conciliation process and my account should get credited sometime in the next seven business days.  They said my account was most likely used to mine bitcoins.  It’s a jungle out there!

Soooo, my AWS account got hacked today. AWS is short for Amazon Webservices and it is basically a platform for you to host all kinds of web service instances through Amazon’s vast server network. Apparently even though I had two form verification active on my account someone hacked it and ran about 160 high volume instances on my account. It had been going on for 12 hours by the time AWS securtiy caught it. Luckily they were watching because even in that short amount of time they racked up over 2,000 dollars in fees on my account. I wiped all my keys and passwords and am working with amazon to resolve the charges. It sounds like everything will be ok but I’ll feel better when I hear the final verdict from Amazon Customer Service.

I successfully deployed Funnypages using Heroku today! You can try the app at http://funnypages.herokuapp.com/funnypages/. As of right now it only has 3 comics. My final task is to have Heroku run my management commands every 30 seconds so that the comics stay up to date. It’s been such a long road getting here I’m not sure what to say. Thank you to all of my friends that supported and encouraged me, and thank you to my mentors, Eric and Brian Carr, for giving me the extra push I needed at times to get to the next level. Now to get a job!

A lot of progress this week! I learned to use BeautifulSoup in place of lxml. It ended up doing a lot of the same stuff in a different way, but the big difference is that it eats html encoding issues for breakfast. Once I was able to reliably target the urls of new webcomic images, I created two new methods in my ComicSeries class. One finds the url for the updated image, and the other checks to see if I already have it and then downloads it and makes a new ComicImg object if I don’t.

I also created a comic scraper management command that runs the image download method for every comic series. Now I just need to hook it up to a cron job and run it every 30 seconds and my project is finished! I will be spending the next couple days working with my mentor to learn to use cron and put FunnyPages into production. I can see the finish line! Well, for my project anyway. The next big adventure will be putting together my resume and trying to get a job interview.