Hey guys. My name is Yuriy.
I got my dev job 18 months ago. At that point I completed free code camp front end certificate and built a couple of one page html sites and small React apps. At that point I was 25. I had a lot of random jobs before, none of them were related to technology. My last job was a waiter in Italian restaurant.
One of my friends is a developer. I deployed small React app to the server and sent him an email with a link. I wasn’t looking for a job at that point, I just wanted to share with him. The app was a biography for all members of Stark family from Game of Thrones. You could click on any member and get detailed view with photos and bio. It was very basic in functionality but it looked good. I used google material design and spend a lot of time tweaking CSS.
One month later I got a call from my friend. He asked me if I am free during lunch and invited me to WeWork location in lower Manhattan. His friends, that are running small dev shop, were looking for a junior developer. I came to WeWork, they showed me their office, we grabbed coffee and chatted in a dining area. We talked about CSS, HTML, git, my experience going through FCC, my React application. I don’t think they cared that much about things that I knew, they wanted to see that I am passionate about web technology and that I can learn. After thirty minutes they offered me a part time internship. That internship grew to a full time employment.
Currently I do full stack development. We use Python/Django for back end. Our clients are small and medium size business.
Today we hired a junior developer. He is currently working as a barista in a coffee shop. I will be partially responsible for assigning him work and bringing him up to speed.
When I just started it took me a while to understand git. I am thinking about writing a article about how we use git in our company. Something like “hey junior developer, here is what you need to know about git”. Let me know if someone would be interested.