Pitch

At the end of the program, we had to present our projects at a hiring fair. I made a slideshow (using Powerpoint, of course), and decorated a trifold with Courier New, azure card paper, and print-outs of my data visualization work. I also prepared some talking points, some resumes, and some business cards.

That was back on June 28th, but it feels ages ago. In the two years since I joined a tech boot camp, I feel like I’ve lived through a decade, quite honestly. I’ve been learning so many things so fast, time feels dilated, the same way hours stretched into days when you were in first grade and discovering what math and language and history and science were.

I didn’t get an offer from my team, which I’ve been psychologically preparing for. I was doing a lot of work that was outside of my graphic design comfort zone, and the consulting firm I was with had problems communicating with my particular team. I’d love to work at Microsoft, but every team has a different workflow and culture, and this one wasn’t a great fit for me.

If I do wind up at Microsoft, I hope to be on a team that is more collaborative and making software for the general public. Don’t get me wrong, I did learn a lot, but after so many years of being on my own as a freelancer, I want to be working with other people, in person, bouncing ideas off of one another and coming to decisions together.

I’m also early in my career, and want to observe how more experienced devs work so I can improve.

Finally, part of what drew me to software was having a new medium for communicating to mass audiences, and my work making internal tools for backend engineers didn’t really pertain to that.

I’ve been applying for roles within Microsoft, as well as at some other companies, both in Seattle and New York. Thankfully, I have a lot of money saved up, so I can survive while job hunting for the next few months. I’m still in Seattle for the time being, but my lease will be up soon, so if I don’t get any bites I’ll be moving back to my hometown.

In addition, I’ve been busy revisiting Javascript, since the most enticing positions I’ve seen often involve knowing Node, Angular, React, or React Native. I started learning to code before I really knew what I wanted to do with it, but now that I’ve been doing different things for a while, it’s starting to become clear: I like working on front-end, using CSS and Swift, but since Swift is still tethered to iOS, I can either stay within Apple’s walled garden or venture into the wider world of web.

I think I’m going to convert some of my mobile apps to web, so they’re more accessible and maintainable, and not as expensive to gain an audience. I had started learning React and React Native before I got the call from Microsoft, and now I’m back at it again.

I am also going to pray that Swift starts seeing more use outside of iOS apps…but I’m not holding my breathe. Maybe in the future we’ll see it being used more widely. I literally can’t wait.