Cody - Final Week

Well we are down to the wire, this is the start of Cody's last week.  I promised he could stay at my place for 30 days, his last day is September 16th!  The good news is Cody has more job leads than ever and is actively pursuing them all.


The other coaching client I told you about who is starting to actively try to get hired, has a 2nd interview at a well known company.  He passed his first interview and is facing the technical interview tomorrow.  I am sure he will have at least one more interview after tomorrow's assuming all goes well :-)  I will let you know how things go for him.


As for me, there are soooo many things that I want to say, that I can't about what I am doing and where I am working :-(  That is the problem with getting hired, it puts a lid on some of the things you would otherwise be able to say and blog about.  I can tell you that I am using Javascript, and Protractor to test a SPA ( Single Page Application ) Angular app.


I find Protractor to be very 'buggy', and to have poor stack trace error messages.  SPA apps in general seem to have about twice as many bugs as a REST app.  I am also noticing that tests are slower to run, as you have to run them through a longer flow to set the 'cookie'.  With a REST app you can simply go to a specific URL and test a single page.  I think long term, SPA apps are not going to be as cool and sexy as they are now.  Once more people actually work on them, and see some of the common issues with maintaining SPA apps.


I am thinking of incorporating the Underscore Library or Lodash Javascript library into my testing framework.  I am not sure If I am allowed to add those libraries or not, but I think it will be cleaner and easier to use some of those built in methods.  I will have to check with some people before I just add a new code library :-)


It feels weird to see how things are changing in our industry with the rise of SPA apps.  One encouraging thing though regardless of what type of coding you do, is seeing how good the job market is.   If you can code and have been doing so for a while.  Every week I get someone asking me to work at company 'X', and why it is a better company than the one I am currently working at.

What's funny to me is if you go on Dice.com, and search for jobs.  You will get soooo many more for jobs for mid level developer positions than junior developer positions.  It's even more obvious when you search for senior developer jobs versus mid level developer jobs.  When you first try to get hired, it will be at a junior level.  The problem is finding a junior position, it can be done, it just takes some work and 'know how'.   It is cool to see once you've been coding for a few years, and have held a couple of positions, how much easier it is to land another job.


I think after 2 -3 years of coding experience, you will have a pretty safe job.  You will be able to move to just about anywhere in the U.S. and land a job without too much difficulty.  If you are struggling to find your first job stick with it, things do get better down the road :-)


Keep coding peeps, you can do this!!!