#blackgirlcodematters

[milacodes]

One Year Later

One year ago yesterday, I stepped into Coding Dojo’s Bellevue office. I was excited and terrified. Today, I feel the exact same way.

Quite a bit has happened since the last time I posted. I had a birthday. I was on the news. I started day-drinking. I watched a lot of HBO Go and Netflix. I adopted a Ukrainian toddler. (One or more of those things may or may not be a lie. That’s for me to know and you to find out.) Also, my basketball team won our Hoopfest bracket - again!

Oh, and I still have a job. So that’s awesome.

Things at work have been intense, hilarious, hectic, encouraging, disappointing, worrying, inspiring and a lot more. On a daily basis. I’m still on the WebOps team, helping TV stations with all their tech problems as best as I can.

Most of my time is still spent providing customer service/tech support. I had hoped to be doing some basic UX/UI development by now, but there just hasn’t been time or space for it. Even though we’re backed by a large broadcasting company, my office environment still feels very much like a start up. There are a lot of projects being developed and even more on the way, so it’s all hands on deck. As a support team, we have to know the products inside and out in order to know what the heck people are talking about when they call in and say something’s broken.

As a result, there hasn’t been a lot of time to step back and shadow a developer, or take time to tinker around on my own. But this company has a lot on its plate and they’re really trying to break new ground, so it’s an interesting place to be right now. And actually, our VP just sent out a company-wide email telling us that there are some awesome things on the horizon, and that now is the perfect time to carve a space for ourselves:

“I encourage each of you to spend time with me to understand how your work makes an impact and how we can invest in you as professionals in that context... If you have needs and expectations for your future, let's discuss them... Ask questions, figure out how you fit in, and ask for a career path you want as we grow.”

Plus, my manager (Brian) has been giving me small projects outside our regular support work to assist on and sometimes be a point of contact for. For example, I maintain the Wordpress site of one of Sinclair’s other sites, American Sports Network (ASN). And soon, I’ll be taking care of another Wordpress site that Sinclair manages - so I’ll be building my debugging skills because my main tasks will be to check out errors in code that I had no hand in writing. (Shout out to Shana for helping me debug my first WP ticket, by the way).

Also, with work piling up because of all of the new projects, there will probably be an opportunity for me to get my hands dirty with some front-end code. In fact, in the words of Brian, I’m “gonna get thrown in the deep end”. So, that’s...exciting and terrifying. Just like my first day at the Dojo.

AND, Brian saw my blog (when I applied for this job because I added the link on my resume, of course) and he’s given me a little writing outlet at work. I send out a weekly email (if I remember) to the WebOps team discussing recent issues or updates within the small side projects that I’ve been assigned to, just to keep folks abreast in my own quirky way. So, (almost) every Thursday, everyone learns about ASN or mobile app issues in my weekly digest, titled Thirsty Thursday - cuz them suckas is thirsty for knowledge. Every Thirsty Thursday ends with:

Stay thirsty, my friends. Mila

Or if I forget to send it on Thursday, it becomes a Fresh Friday and the sign off is:

Stay so fresh and so clean, clean. Mila

Either way, they’re reminded of something awesome - a fascinating ad campaign or one of the greatest rap groups of all time. You’re welcome, WebOps team. You’re welcome.

[milacodes]

OhMyGodINeedToDoMyTaxes (and other updates)

Heavens to Betsy, I need to get my taxes done. Time to call my accountant.

My accountant, James.

On an unrelated note: You guys remember when I said I would update you with how my first week was at my new job? Whoopsie daisy!

I’m about the start my 8th week, so there’s a lot to catch you up on. Strap in.

The Office My office is right next to Seattle Center. I’m actually in the KOMO building, on the same floor where they film the news. So far, I’ve had Molly Shen, Brad Goode and Steve Pool sightings. Look ‘em up. The People My coworkers are awesome. I can talk sports with at least 2 of them. Another taught me the history of Fiji and the different cultures the country has. And I can drop lines from Anchorman with another. Milk was a bad choice.

The Job It’s been interesting so far. I’m on the WebOps team, which provides customer service and support for the TV stations that use the CMS (Content Management System, like Wordpress) that Sinclair Digital built. Most issues the TV stations have are simple fixes like giving someone access to a certain site, or making edits to pages on the CMS. But every once in a while something in the CMS breaks and emergency calls start coming in. That’s where the WebOps team shines - or in my case, panic and escalate the problem as quickly as possible.

Me, whenever the phone rings.

For the first 7 weeks I’d been doing only customer service/support work and hadn’t looked at any code. That was a bit disappointing, but there were a couple reasons for this. One was that I needed to fully understand the process of helping customers navigate the CMS. Another was just the fact that I didn’t have the right computer. But that’s going to change soon. I’ve finally gotten set up on a Macbook pro with all the programs that I need. Soon, I’ll be able to take on some of the work that requires a code change, but doesn’t need to get escalated to the developers that are focused on other things, like implementing new features for the site.

Other Junk

I’m still an instructor for Girls Who Code. I was afraid work would be too busy, but my manager, Brian, has allowed me to participate every 3 weeks, so that’s awesome.

Brian has set me up with a mentor. She’s one of 2 female developers in the whole office. Our meetings have been helpful. Since I haven’t touched code yet, I haven’t had many work related tech questions to ask. But her main advice to me is to stay busy building my own projects so I don’t forget what I learned at Coding Dojo.

So, I dragged my friend, and fellow Coding Dojo grad, Shana into a weekly coding night. Both of our jobs aren’t code-heavy, so we meet every Wednesday after work and attempt to code. So far, I’ve built...nothing. But it’s the thought that counts.

I’ve realized how hard it is to have side projects outside of work. I need to keep up on my skills, but Grey’s Anatomy isn’t gonna watch itself, amiriiiiiiiiight?

Ugh. Taxes.

[milacodes]

It’s Black History Month, Y’all! (and other updates)

Hello, everybody! First off, Happy Black History Month. Let us all praise Queen Beyonce.

Good. Now, I know it’s been about a month since my last post, but, boy, do I have some updates for you. I had to take a break from posting because there were only so many times I could talk about my job search (aka lack of employment) before my soul crumbled to bits. But guess what! Last week, I accepted a job offer! It was only 6+ months ago that I started at Coding Dojo in order to gain a skill that would make me desirable enough for companies to offer me full-time, salaried positions, doing creative, challenging work. I guess all that hard work paid off. I got a job, y’all! I’m out of the contract game!

Hallelujah!

The company I’ll be working for is Sinclair Digital, which is a small offshoot of Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG), which owns a bunch of TV stations across the US, including Komo 4. SBG is headquartered in Baltimore, but their Sinclair Digital branch has set up shop in Seattle. So, I’ll be working in the Komo 4 building, down the street from Seattle Center. I get to stay in my city! Hazaa!

My role is Web Operations Support Associate II. Basically, SBG has a bunch of TV stations that need websites built. That’s where Sinclair Digital comes in. But those websites also need to be maintained and/or updated. So, those stations submit requests for changes/fixes. That’s where I come in. I can either check out the code to try and find the issue myself, or send it to proper team to make the fix. (I think that’ll be the workflow. I haven’t started yet. Countdown til Feb 22nd begins...now.) I think this job will be a great opportunity for me because it combines a lot of skills that I’ve built throughout my short career. Customer service (from the movie theater and Expedia), Code (Coding Dojo), Quality Assurance (Google, and my Software Testing/QA certificate from UW), and I get to be near media! During my interview, on my tour through the Komo 4 building, I actually saw spaces where they film news segments! So, I’m a little pumped about this situation right now.

How I feel.

In other news, I started volunteering with Girls Who Code a few weeks ago. The school I got placed at? None other than the great James A. Garfield High School, my alma mater. It was definitely weird to go back, but it’s awesome to see how it’s changed. Mine was the last class to graduate from the original building before it got remodeled, so everything’s a little different. The girls are quiet, just like I was (and very much still am), but the fact that they attend this after-school club shows that they know exactly how important code will be for their careers and future. They’re ahead of the game. I’d expect nothing less from a fellow Bulldog. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep helping the GHS Girls Who Code club now that I have a job, but I’m hoping the scheduling will work out. We’ll see!

That’s all for now! I’ll be sure to keep everybody posted on my first day. In the meantime, I have to take a drug test to complete my hiring process. Wish me luck! Just kidding. I’ll be fine. I’m not a hooligan.

[milacodes]

Happy New Year / Life update

I’m about a week late, but Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a very nice Festichristmahannukwanzicas season. Mine was delightful. Everybody came home for the holidays. My mother gave us all animal t-shirts.

I shall cherish it forever.

In other news, I’m still searching for a job. A lot of people from my cohort are still looking, too. Hopefully, now that the holidays are out of the way, things will pick up. I think one issue I’m encountering, though, is that there don’t seem to be many entry level or junior developer positions. Seems like companies don’t want to take the time to invest in and train folks anymore. Does everyone really have to come in with mid-career experience?? I don’t know, but I have hope that I’ll find something. I have to face every day like this dog:

Anyway, in my last post I said that I would update you on my portfolio. Update: it’s been done. Check it out on milacodes.github.io. It took me a while because I built it without the use of a front-end framework. I wanted to see how the image carousel, text animations, and all that jazz truly worked before I started using shortcuts. I think it turned out alright. Now that I’m done with that, I’ve started a couple courses on Udemy in order to learn some new skills and stay up on the skills I already have. I bought like 5 courses. I got a little too excited when I saw all the topics I could learn. They were on sale though, don’t worry. New Years Resolution sale for the win.

Me, when I saw the deals on Udemy’s site.

So, that’s about it. I spend my days finding jobs, filling out applications, watching videos on Udemy and continuing to build. There isn’t much of a schedule and I end up working til pretty late at night. It’s midnight as I’m writing this right now. I usually always feel like I had a great day since I got a lot of work done, but that thought always fades when I go to bed... Staring at this bright laptop screen so late into the night is really messing with my sleep schedule. Last night I went to bed at midnight. The last time that I saw on the clock was 3am.

It’s pretty terrible. But when I’m laying in bed, all I think about are sites that I want to build. Or techniques I want to learn. Or features I want to implement. I'm always thinking about code. So, I guess it’s not all bad. Or it is. Either one.

[milacodes]

Quick Pre-Christmas Post

Hanukkah’s over, but there are still 10 days til Xmas and 11 days til Kwanzaa. And for all you heathens, 8 days til Festivus!

So, happy holidays, folks! I know it’s been a while since my last post. Now that the bootcamp is over, there haven’t been as many crazy/amazing/stressful/awesome things to report. But I still wanted to keep everybody in the loop. Since the bootcamp ended, as you know, I had one interview that didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. But in my last post, I talked about how I’m okay with that. Since that interview, I have been working on polishing up projects and deploying them onto the interwebs for the world to see. Took me a while but I finally got that done. In fact, take a look at this one. It’s my own little scheduling app for all the pet/house-sitting I do around town. It was built using the MongoDB, Express, Angular and Node technologies, or MEAN, aka that one test I didn’t pass... Pfffffffft. Test, Schmest. MEAN can’t hold me down!

Anyway, now that my projects look fairly presentable, I’ve moved on to building my online portfolio, where I’ll introduce myself and display some of the projects I’ve done. I’m nowhere near being done, but here’s a lil preview. Don’t mind the mess.

The building of my portfolio is basically all Front-end web development. I won’t need to store any user information, so I won’t need a database or server. This website is purely HTML, CSS and JQuery (which is a library of pre-built JavaScript code).

In web development, to make things easier and faster, there are these things called frameworks, which are packages of standardized code. If a developer wants to quickly create a responsive site (able to scale to different screen sizes for phones and tablets) that has a polished look then they can easily use a front-end framework which has the necessary HTML, CSS and JS documents pre-built. Some of the most popular front-end frameworks are Bootstrap and Foundation, and in fact, each of my main projects uses a different front-end framework.

However, I am choosing to build my portfolio site without the use of a front-end framework. If I want to be a front-end developer I want to show that I know the process going on behind all of the pre-built code. This is taking a little longer than I thought, though...

Here are some things I’ve learned while trying to build my portfolio from scratch:

This is hard.

The learning never stops.

This is cool.

Now it’s time for Meet a Coding Kid...to be over. I’ve run out of classmates to profile. Since graduation, everybody has gone their separate ways, so I have no more pictures. Ah, well. It was fun while it lasted!

I’ll be checking back in to update everybody on how my portfolio is going!

[milacodes]

Post Thanxgiving Update

I just flew back from New York (where my family spent Thanksgiving) and boy are my arms tired... because they’re sore and achy, probably because I may or may not have the flu. But I knew it was coming. My body always does this to me. It holds on strong during the stressful or important times, then when it sees the coast is clear...BOOM. Mila gets sick. I can’t tell you how many times this happened to me in college, after finals week:

My good, old immune system held on through three months of an intense coding bootcamp, one month of residency, and one week in NY with the family. Now, it deserves a break. That’ll do, immune system. That’ll do. (Say it like the ending to Babe.)

Anyway, I’m a little under the weather right now, but I do have some updates to give you. Breaking News! There are now THREE black women on the Coding Dojo Black Belt wall! Congrats to Porsha R. for passing the MEAN stack test! Porsha is an awesome lady who has a coding blog of her own. Check it out here!

Not So Breaking News. My interview I had a couple Mondays ago didn’t go as well as I’d hoped. I was asked to solve an algorithm that I was able to solve, but not without a little help from the interviewer. I also don’t think I talked out my thinking process very well. There were a few times when I was staring at the whiteboard thinking about my next steps, and the interviewer was left wondering what was going through my head. It’s necessary in these technical interviews to always communicate with the interviewer, so they know how you’re thinking and how well you communicate issues with others. However, with me being a prime example of an introvert, I’m used to being in my head; thinking things out before I act or speak. Soooo........that’s gotta change. It sucks that the interview didn’t go well, but I’m honestly okay with it. This was my very first technical interview and I know there are going to be some growing pains. I figure that I have to get a few more of them under my belt before I’m completely comfortable. Seattle is a major tech hub and I’m sure there will be more opportunities. I just hope I don’t run out of money first...

And now it’s time for Meet a Coding Kid! This week, meet Steven and Preston.

Steven is a UW graduate and Biology major. After realizing that he didn’t want to go to medical school (his original plan), he came to Coding Dojo, where his younger brother had succeeded a few cohorts before ours. Preston had an interesting job before Coding Dojo as a Surgical Recovery Tech. What do they do, you might ask? Well, according to Indeed.com, they are “responsible for the aseptic surgical recovery of donated cadaveric tissues and organs that are used in transplantation”. Bless your heart, Preston. Excuse me while I tend to my queasy stomach.

[milacodes]

Post Graduation Update

Long time no see, folks! Sorry for missing a couple posts. I’ve just been busy trying to get myself together, so I’m at least a little bit ready for the professional world. I am two weeks into Coding Dojo’s residency program; two weeks to go. My main focus has been completing/polishing projects so that they can be added to my portfolio/personal website (which I’m also building at the moment).

All of my projects have the same issue/fix that needs to be addressed. I’ve gotta make it look pretty. Coding Dojo’s curriculum is very ‘back-end’ heavy. The back-end of a website consists basically everything that the user doesn’t see, including properly inserting and retrieving user data into and from databases. I can understand Coding Dojo’s approach - if the data isn’t right, then the user is not happy. However, if the data doesn’t look pretty, or isn’t displayed in an aesthetically pleasing way, then the user isn’t happy either. So, I need to study up on ‘front-end’ development. At the dojo, we definitely learned the basics of HTML and CSS, but I want to learn more about the different front-end frameworks available, as well as interactivity and basic design principles. Plus, in this mobile world, I need to make sure that a site looks good not only on a laptop, but also on a phone. And I’ve got to hurry because throughout the program I realized that front-end is actually the area that I want to go into, career-wise. I’ve got a lot of YouTube tutorials to watch...

As a result of my push to learn front-end (and my need for a job), I’ve had to let go of a dream: I can no longer chase after that second Black Belt. I spent the most of the first week of residency preparing to take the MEAN belt over again. And that Saturday, *breaking news*, I failed again. My only consolation is that, unlike the other times I took the test, this time there wasn’t a specific error I came up against or issue that I couldn’t solve. I just ran out of time. If I had just another half hour, I know I could have done it. I was .5 points away from a passing score. This was the closest I had gotten. Unfortunately, it’s the closest I’ll ever get. *sigh*. MEAN belt, you have eluded me, you scoundrel. But I’ve spent too much time on you. I’ve got to move on...*sniffle*

But for any future employers out there, please understand that just because I didn’t pass the test in the allotted time, it doesn’t mean that I don’t understand MEAN. In fact, I have built more complete projects using MEAN than anyone else in my cohort. Literally. Each Belt test is a mini project and before we could retake a test, we had to complete/fix our previous one to make it a ‘perfect 10’. I have completed this process...ahem...a few times. Plus, my personal project that I started during project week was built using the MEAN technologies. Please believe. I can get MEAN. (It may just take me a little bit longer, is all. Don’t worry about it.)

In other news, I have a job interview on Monday. Whoa.

Now it’s time for Meet a Coding Kid! This week, meet Mark and Erika!

Mark is a graduate of UW who spent time as an English language instructor/translator in Germany before coming back to the states to learn Web Development at the dojo.

Erika spent time working in the marketing department at a mortgage company before deciding that coding was the way to go. Good choice, Erika. Good choice.

[milacodes]

Graduation and Beyond

Welp, we did it. It was a crazy 3 months, but we did it.

Now when I say ‘we’, I could of course be describing my whole cohort. But I’m using ‘we’ specifically for me and the two other African American students in my cohort, Cornell and Shana. We came in with a goal to earn our Black Belts and we reached it. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you look on the Black Belt wall and see almost no one that looks like you, it kind of is. So I’m giving us all a shout out. Cornell is the 3rd Black male to earn his Black Belt at the Bellevue Coding Dojo, and Shana and I are the only Black women. There are a few more Black students in the junior and freshman cohorts, and I can’t wait for them to earn their Black Belts, too. The wall’s still looking a little bare.

Even though we’ve finished the 3 month coursework, we’re not even close to being done. We’ve got more career workshops, more resume and Linked In updates and plenty of portfolio and project prep to get ready for interviews. That’s why Coding Dojo has created their own Residency program. Any recent graduate that wants to can keep coming to the dojo and work every day. In exchange, we sign up for times to be a TA for the newer cohorts, which will not only help the new students, but reinforce our knowledge. Residency is structured to help us fill out our portfolio (there’s a real push for polishing up projects or add new features to completed ones) and to prepare us for interview (the morning algorithms don’t stop). Plus, we’ll be mentored by one of the instructors and we’ll have code reviews with our fellow residents. AND, we can retake any tests that we need. MEAN Black Belt, I’m still coming for you.

Sooooo, I’m definitely signing up for residency...

And now it’s time for Meet a Coding Kid! This week, meet Eric and Rovshen.

Eric is a mechanical engineer who came all the way to the dojo from Miami. He hopes to get into IOS app development and even virtual reality.

Rovshen is from Turkmenistan. You read that right. Turkmenistan. Find a map. I’ll wait... Found it? Good. Rovshen loves the Ruby language and hopes to find a job working with it.