En Route To Industry: Tips on Transferring from College into Industry

En Route to Industry

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Tips on Transitioning from College Into Industry

Doreen Hakimi Software Engineer

Oct 11, 2015

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Step 1 Find Your Destination

(Second)

Step 1: Find Your Destination

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●  Make friends ●  Learn learn learn ●  Find what you like ●  Career fairs & networking events ●  Company research

○ Like a company? Become a contributor!


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●  Programming Interview Preparation


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Step 2 Optimize Your Route

Step 2: Optimize Your Route

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●  Things to optimize:

Skill Tools For Optimization

•  Text Editing •  Vim (MacVim) •  Dvork (Optional)

•  Source Control •  Fish Shell •  Git Town

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“As programmers, we live in a world of complex systems and variables. It is incredibly challenging to simply execute a well defined and focused task, especially if you are not terribly experienced with the tools at your disposal, or the codebase you are working on. This is the life of the junior developer. You are fresh out of school, and think you know everything. Suddenly, you are faced with the fact that what you learned about in school was actually quite poor preparation for the types of problems you are encountering. Things are more messy. Less theoretically pure. You are existing in a realm of compromises, and can never make assumptions about anything. Dealing with this is really all you can focus on, and it is what you really should be trying your best to learn. Junior developers need a lot of direction, supervision, and mentoring because of this, or they can stay in this place for a very, very long time (I recently encountered a fellow who had been building software for almost a decade who I would say is still a junior). You can say that this period is really about acquisition of tactical, day to day techniques.”

Source: http://mattbriggs.net/blog/2015/06/01/the-role-of-a-senior-developer/


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●  Get into the habit of breaking your code and fixing it ●  Powerful tool: Cucumber (cucumber.io)


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●  Get into the habit of breaking your code and fixing it


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●  Develop good coding practices ○ (TDD) Test Driven Development ○ Code linting ○ Circle CI to integrate these into Git

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●  Find a mentor to aid in your growth ●  Build day-to-day tactics

○ Problems? Talk it out! ■  Some personal examples:

●  Stuck? Go for a walk! ●  10-minute rule



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●  Assume the role of a good junior developer:

“A good junior developer can be given a known

task, and be expected to execute it quickly, and

well.” Source: http://mattbriggs.net/blog/2015/06/01/the-role-of-a-senior-developer/

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Step 3 GOOOOOO!

Doreen Hakimi Software Engineer [email protected]

Questions?