tl;dr

I want to get hired at colabel as a software developer within 6 months. This series is to document my progress over time, and if you want, feel free to follow along!

The decision

The plan has been made: I have decided to switch careers from being a manager at a global logistics company to becoming a full stack developer. I am making the attempt to get hired at colabel, founded by the two fellows @thilohuellmann and @gerokeil. These guys are fantastic and I just love the product they are building. They can afford to set a very high bar for new hires, meaning that not only do I need to buckle up but I will be working with really good software developers - if I can make it on the team.

The plan

What?

I want to become really good at web development with all bells and whistles and machine learning. Hence, there are a few things that I want to be comfortable with. Here is a not-yet-complete list:

Full stack (web) development

• Databases
• Building APIs
• Docker & Kubernetes
• Deployment
• Make it look ok with React & Material

Machine learning

• Bleeding edge of research (computer vision and NLP)
• Keras & Tensorflow
• Cloud deployment

How?

Full stack (web) development:

• Udacity Nanodegree
• Own projects, such as my website (please don't run any SQL injections yet 🤫)
• Free Code Camp

Machine Learning:

• Unpaid internship at colabel
• Read 1 research paper per day
• Kaggle

Also, since I have been sleeping under a rock for most of my life, I also want to become more active on selected social sites. Just recently I started using my dusty-since-creation Twitter account @_ajascha (the first two weeks have been surprisingly informative!) and I found this fabulous community here.

... and most importantly: routines! More to that in a future post, but it all comes down to (spoiler alert) Four disciplines of Execution.

When?

Planning is guessing but by the end of May, I want to be fully employed - that leaves me with 6 months and 5 days. That timeline is ambitious but with more time I would simply procrastinate more. When I read Austin Tackaberry's great article on "0 to job in 9 months", I thought that my plan must be doable. Plus, with fast-growing startups the opportunity window does not necessarily become bigger over time.

Disclaimer: I am not starting from zero

... but neither are you if you are already on DEV. I have a business degree and no formal technical education. My first Hello, world goes back about three years and I have been treating programming as a hobby for most of it. I am able to build websites with Django and Bulma (I love it!), deploy them and recently got into building (working) machine learning models. But to put things in perspective: Whenever I see HTML, CSS and JavaScript as a prerequisite for something, my mind takes a quick vacation. But that of course should change now in a hurry!

Why DEV?

I want to give back to the community of developers that has made all this possible. Not too long ago, I used to think of software development as an entirely frustrating experience for regular people like I am. But thanks to countless people who are devoting their time to build fabulous things, those days are over.

Perhaps Medium would have been the natural habitat for this. However, I think that such articles should be free to read. I used to be a fan of Medium but now I think they are exploiting their market dominance too much, hence the party venue has changed to DEV!

To finish things off, a note to self: Now get back out there and code!