I met my goal.

I posted a blog post on August 6, 2021 stating that I want to get a job before april 2022. During that time, I was creating projects for my resume. I was reading up on what people in the industry have to say about landing a job without a degree. The most common advice is to have projects that demonstrate my skills to potential employers.

It was an effective advice. By January I was started looking for local jobs. February of 2022, I found a job that fit my criteria well. The interview went well. I demonstrated some of my projects and one of their programmers asked me programming questions. The questions were about programming best practices, what I do when I can’t solve a programming problem.

I was hired by a team of data scientists developing a product from their university research. They’re funded by the government and partnered with their university.

Our core team is composed of 4 people. I’m the one in charged of programming the product. Our project leader is a Cs doctorate and a professor in the university. the working environment is what you’d expect from a government and academic environment – they’re pretty formal, and buzzwords amaze them. Especially that the project is focused on blockchain tech. It’s a unique experience to be surrounded by non-programming (but otherwise technical) people speculating on the technology.

In the office, I get to meet different kinds of people. It’s great to be surrounded by people smarter than me, especially programmers. I can ask them advice on technical topics and most of the time that’s when I learn new things.

I have never made a complete system until now

Now that I’m hired, I realized I will be creating a complete system. I used to only create scripts for my amusement and portfolio. Developing a whole system – one that should be able to perform its functions well and be easy to use is different from programming simple scripts.

I remember being overwhelmed of how I will plan things out. As always, you’ll never realize how important planning is until you’re in the middle of development. In our case, I wasn’t able to plan much because of uncertainties on the hardware and its communications.

For context, The project is a renewable energy trading platform based on blockchain.

The development of this project taught me a lot of things as a programmer. I wrote code from low level hardware code, react js frontend code, django backend code, solidity code, and bash. Bash was really useful for me when it came to testing and automating things.

x by example, x styleguide

Most of the software I wrote were new languages or concepts to me.

Being already familiar with multiple programming languages, reading x by example, was the fastest way to get coding. Now, when I encounter a new language, I’ll read x by example. This works fine for small programs and programming languages that I probably will not use much. Reading solidity by example supplemented with the solidity style guide, I wrote decent smart contracts (I think)

TDD is great if the project is complex.

For complex projects such as our backend server (django), test-driven devleopment helped a lot. I can’t imagine how much time i saved by creating tests to implement features in such a complex system. Compared to just using print() like I’m used to. Now, If i’m going to work on a project where printing will be cumbersome (solidity is another example), I will instead write tests to develop software function by function. For simple scripts, I will still stick to print(). BTW, using debugger; is great for frontend javascript projects.

Templates are great

For the frontend, we used an open source dashboard template written in react and material-ui. This helped the project progress fast. It was better for our small team to spend our time modifying the defaults of the template instead of starting from scatch. Existing components were used as basis for creating our own new components. Being written in react, any new member of the team will most likely be able to contribute to the frontend.

Thoughts on blockchain

Gas is still a problem. I think, currently that blockchain is great for creating organizations because of its ability to store simple data and make it available to everyone globally with not much infrastructure.

In my opinion, the current state of the art is only at the tip of the iceberg of what blockchain can offer. Currently, we mostly see applications that can theoretically be made using basic web architectures (server and client). Blockchain only acts as improvement to the previous architectures. Many people don’t bother with it because the improvements it brings are not worth the additional complexity that come with it.

More reasearch is needed. I can’t say whether blockchain is a useless tool or not because we still haven’t discovered its true properties. The project that I am working on made me see how it can be a useful innovation for the technology of the incoming generation. I’ll probably write a research article about it soon.

Failures

• Deciding architecture

  Back when we were starting to develop the project, I hit a roadblock. I didn’t know how I would integrate the whole project. It’s not that I didn’t know what to do, I was stuck deciding which design was the best. My first choice was to put react inside of django so I can use django’s templating capabilities with react. I tried that and modified a lot of code for the react material-ui frontend but in the end, it was janky. I realized that a backend server serving an api will be the better design. So I reverted most of the changes that I did and had the frontend and backend be separate entities. I’m glad that I did. The seperation made the program code cleaner and flexible.

  I was lucky that it was just mostly me and my other coworker doing development that time. the size of our team allowed us to flexibly change the architecture without anyone else complaining. I was really close to having a really bad developer experience for the rest of my time there.

• Not knowing lower-level side of computers

  Being a self-taught programmer who learned programming by creating simple python scripts for automation, I never really bothered to learn binary arithmetic and communications. That mistake hit me. I had to write programs for two kinds of devices which had different communications. Good thing some other developers created packages for easy communication with these hardware. I still had to learn their communication protocols and binary arithmetic to fully use and understand the hardware. It took me quite some time to learn.

• Plans after getting a job

  Before getting a job, I told myself that if I ever get one, I will work from 9 to 5 then study more programming at home. That didn’t happen. I told a programmer co-worker about this and they told me they actually had the same plans but were also not able to do it after getting hired. This led me to believe that having an onsite job is actually a lot more draining than working at home.

It’s been a year now and the project is near completion. I met new people, learned new things, encountered problems I was able to solve, and got paid. The project is a one year contract so I’ll be jobless again soon. I need to think of another plan. Should I get a new job? Study in a university? Both?