Two Years of Code - Part One
In April of 2021, I had decided I needed a break from working in retail/customer-facing environments. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, my anxiety regarding social interactions had skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. Coincidentally, a past friend of mine had manifested themselves back into my life and told me about her experience working with code. A feeling of intrigue caught onto me and my life hasn’t been the same since.
When something promising comes into my life, I latch onto it like a turtle to its shell. An introductory course introducing basic languages such as HTML5 and CSS3 showed me that coding was not so difficult and it, in fact, could be used for so many different use cases. You could build a funny looking animation, a CSS-only painting or an entire website from scratch. The course provided by Juno College, simply called “Introduction to Web Development”, was also my first time trying something new in a completely remote environment. This was a great thing for me at the time due to my crippling social anxiety.
Then came the Web Development bootcamp. Juno’s promise of a promising career path was appealing, if not crazily expensive. A three month course that could show me all of the up-to-date tools that I would need to attain my first actual job as a developer. I worked my butt off for those three months, learning all kinds of neat skills such as APIs, React and SaaS. I, along with a few dozen of my classmates, were feeling on top of the world. We had all built multiple projects that were previously deemed by most of us to be completely out of our skill ranges and it was invigorating to see our names attached to them.
I wish I could say so many things to myself post-bootcamp. The months following the completion of my three-month endeavour at Juno College were mentally draining beyond all measure for me. Gone were the days of accountable deadlines and code-reviews every other day. Gone were the days of getting a project done every week. Now I was only held accountable by one person: myself.
My career search specialist assigned to me was only able to do so much. She would touch base with me every week and try to set goals such as applying for five jobs a week, or sending out intro emails to two employers of interest. I found myself dealing with a crippling sense of option paralysis coupled with feelings of self-imposed existential dream as I often do when left to my own devices. After June of 2021, I spent months applying to maybe a few dozen jobs a month aimlessly, until one day my career search specialist stumbled onto a job post and applied on my behalf.
