It’s been a pretty busy 6 months since my last blog post, and I have so much to talk about. I started, developed and completed the final project for my CS conversion masters’ degree, all while starting my first tech job as a graduate. The game I made for my final project was an escape room game in the Godot engine that you can play in your browser! I plan to write a whole blog post soon about my development experience with Godot and making my first game, but I also intend to start steering this blog down a more personal route.

What I want to focus on in this blog post is a recount of my entire experience starting from being a no-coder pleb and ending up with my first job in the tech industry. Back in mid 2021, I was looking for jobs primarily focused in the chemistry industry and found a job working as a brewer for a certain Welsh beermaker. It started off as a very exciting and interesting position where I learned a tremendous amount of brewing knowledge, applied some chemistry and biology knowledge to studying the brew process, brewing over 500,000 pints of beer and getting to take plenty of free beer home! However, it didn’t go to plan and I was promptly out of a job. After moving back to my home town, Swansea, I picked up a part-time job which involved running a “library of things” - a low-cost borrowing scheme which focuses on renting out useful tools that people may only need to use once or twice in order to reduce the number of unused tools being sent to landfill. There was a lot of downtime while I worked there, which I filled by learning how to code.

I decided on Python as my language for learning how to code, as I had used it previously in school and although I barely remembered any, I remembered how quick and easy it was to pick up. It was thrilling to discover just how interesting programming could be; even writing basic scripts to manipulate strings while following Zed A. Shaw’s ‘Learn Python The Hard Way’ was enough fun for me to stick at it. Some people may think Python is not a good language to start with because the syntax and high level of abstraction hides a lot of the inner workings of the code away, but I beg to differ. With Python, someone with no real prior programming experience was able to learn enough to make fun beginner projects such as text-based adventure games and interacting with web APIs within a month. Isn’t it exciting?

The next area of interest for me after learning how to program was how to make websites. In secondary school, I used to make horrible looking webpages using only HTML and styling straight from the early days of the internet. I followed a Udemy tutorial for making modern and responsive webpages using HTML & CSS, which was a great foundation for starting web development. On the side, using my newly developed Python skills, I started working on Discord bots using the discord.py library. It was around this time that I started seeing programming as a potential career option for me, and I had a look around for jobs. Since I didn’t get many responses at first, this led me down the route of returning to university to complete a 1-year full-time “CS conversion” MSc course at Swansea University. I don’t think doing the conversion course was really neccessary, but it definitely helped steer my learning, keep me focused and provide me with feedback on my skills while working towards a new certification. My final project gave me an opportunity to pick up skills that I never expected I’d get to learn or apply in a useful sense, and it was great fun to work on.

It was also around this time that I was reached out to by a recruiter on LinkedIn about the job I ended up working in now. Keeping LinkedIn updated is worth it, and I think making posts about other projects I’d been working on also helped give my profile a bit of a boost on searches. After being contacted by the recruiter, I had a 40-minute phone call to go over my profile, and then was invited to a 2-hour technical interview. Having spent months grinding out Leetcode problems, I felt prepared for anything and breezed through the interview task without an issue. I think the task was a bit on the easy side, but par for the course for a graduate software developer role.

In summary, the points I think that were most important to my career development are:

• Keep learning as you go by doing projects
• Have a presence on LinkedIn
• Don’t be discouraged from trying

It’s daunting making a sideways leap between careers, and I often felt nervous about doing it. But I wasn’t the first to walk down this path, and it’s getting increasingly common, so don’t feel like it’s unusual to do. If anything, now is a better time than ever to make the leap!