Léo-Paul's Blog
🚀 Retrospective 2020 and how I got back to code

🚀 Retrospective 2020 and how I got back to code

Léo-Paul MARTIN's photo
Léo-Paul MARTIN
·

5 min read

Retrospective 2020

In 2020 I did a working holiday visa and lived abroad (Japan) for a year. During that year, I could take a step back about daily life and work and completely enjoy Japan in several places. Following fact related to development :

  • Attend the Global Game Jam at Okinawa
  • Remake of a "JEE university project" using Java Spring Boot framework
  • Explore the diversity of job opportunity in Japan
  • Read job description and do interviews in Japanese
  • Having interviews/advice with recruiters
  • Passing through code test and tech interviews

My attempt in IT in Japan

In France, after a master's degree, I started to work on a project using low-code tech with an off-shore team in India and it was really cool. After 3 years, I wanted to try something else so I left for Japan without any idea about IT in Japan.

Once in Japan, I naively thought I could easily start from scratch a new career as a developer "whatever" (front-end/back-end/mobile/software) and decided to take a look at job opportunities during the beginning of the pandemic.

The techno I saw the most was Nodejs, Ruby on Rails, Go, and Mobile tech. And they were looking for 3 years of experience as developers/lead tech/team manager. When diving into tutorials, I realized how fast the code in web dev evolves and how far I was from catching up with everything after 3 years of low-code work experience.

Applying to several job offers without experience on the specific tech stack was maybe not a good idea but at least gave me some tech interviews and coding test experience as well as meet interesting and passionate people.

I had questions about basics like SOLID and Test Driven Development or to describe the architecture to recommend for a certain scenario but also senior-level questions such as IDE settings for multi-thread performance.

It's during tech interviews (I hate interviews 👿) that I kind of faced the "imposter syndrome" after that. Especially during an interview when the recruiter asked me about my GitHub and told me that I wasn't coding that often (to not say never 😅).

Anyway, It didn't work for me this time but I kind of went back to coding thanks to that! Thanks to my company in France, I was able to resume work in October on my way back on a low-code tech project again.

Taking actions

Since October, I took the following actions:

  • Push some code every day
  • Following trending Github/Twitter/youtube account of developers
  • Following Github repos
  • Read at least 3 articles on Daily.dev
  • Use chrome and VSCode extension that saves life and time
  • Get tons of idea and tutorial to never get bored
  • Improve my skills on the front-end side about javascript frameworks, CSS library, and serverless tools

What I have achieved in 3 months

  • Watching webinar about Koltin, Gatsby, AI
  • Learning Reactjs by making Reactjs clone apps
  • Making my portfolio using Reactjs and Gatsby
  • Learning how to use serverless application for hosting, realtime-database, authentication, form function, etc... with firebase and Netlify

I made 518 contributions in 2020

Capture.PNG

Starting a blog for the new year

I used to take notes when I'm working on a personal project about my path of thought, the errors I made and I ended up flooding my Google Drive with docs. Thanks to this article I created a blog.

Doing the #2Articles1Week Challenge seems to be also a good way for me to start the blog. Recently I realized I found more solutions/ideas on blog posts than StackOverflow.

Best of luck for the next year and many more to come 🙏

Have a great 2021!

2Articles1Week