What is your long term goal and/or career pathway?

My long-term goal is to get a full-time job as soon as possible after graduating. Ideally I’d like to work as a full-stack developer, but wouldn’t be opposed to purely back-end work at the right workplace.

Because most of my work history to date has been with a startup, I’d like to get a job in a bigger company to round out that experience and learn how to work at scale with large teams.

I’m considering moving out of Auckland, so would be willing to relocate to anywhere in New Zealand to get my first dev job.

A description of your own strengths and limitations in relation to learning

My main learning strengths are efficiency and persistance. I can locate whatever information is needed to move me forward on a project very quickly – my ‘Google-fu’ is strong! Once I am invested in a project or topic I also find it easy to keep working on it and persevere through the complicated parts, especially if I’m in a flow state.

My limitations are that I can be perfectionistic, which isn’t great for programming because it means I can overly focus on fine details before the core functionality is worked out. I’m getting better at this but it still crops up at times, especially if the project is far beyond my skill level and I feel stressed about it.

What skills (non-technical - human skills) would you like to see developed in yourself while at Dev Academy?

I would like to understand more about how software is developed in teams. In particular, I think it will be good for me to practice working on a segment of a project only, and communicating with team members how our segments will fit together. The only practice projects I’ve done so far I’ve done alone, so I expect this will be a very different experience.

A commitment to how you will manage your workload in this programme

To manage my workload in this programme, I’m going to set clear goals for each week and try to achieve their sub-goals as early as possible each week. During the Foundations course this should be easy due to the clear instructions and timeboxes, but during the Bootcamp these goals may become a bit more flexible.

If I feel unmotivated or slow on a given day, I’ll use the Pomodoro technique to get myself ‘in the zone’ at the start of the day.

If the tasks are building up, I’ll roughly prioritise what needs to done, do the most important few things, then reassess. If needs be, I’ll also talk to a Facilitator or ask my fellow students for help.

A commitment as to how and where you will seek help in a timely way

If I’ve been struggling on the same problem for more than 30 minutes and don’t even have a thread to follow or a lead on where to begin, I’ll ask my peers for any resources that helped them / documentation to check out / hints on where to begin. If that still doesn’t get me started after another 30 minutes, I’ll reach out to a Facilitator.

A description of what you expect from the facilitation team

I expect that if I seek feedback on some code, I’ll get honest answers about how to improve it, where I am going wrong, and what concepts I need to spend additional time understanding.

I also expect that the curriculum will give me either an understanding of, or knowledge of the existence of, key concepts that I need to become an effective software developer. Of course, this knowledge will keep expanding beyond the course and throughout my career, but “knowing what I don’t know” will give me an idea of where to look first.

Any scheduling information such as block-out times when you are committed to other things. For example, you might have whānau commitments like school drop-offs. It’s important to plan these in.

If possible, I’m going to keep going to sportsfighting 2-3 evenings a week, because my trainer sometimes relies on me to help teach new students. However, if this interferes with my studies or I fall behind (especially during the Bootcamp phase) I’ll drop this activity for the duration.