Today marks the beginning of this small blog in the big, wide ocean of the internet!
Anywho, a bit about the background behind why I have created this blog. I’m usually the sort of person who prefers avoiding things that take a lot of effort. You know, avoiding the sort of thing like starting and maintaining a blog. In fact, I still had an aversion to starting a blog up until a few weeks ago until a series of events and circumstances changed my mind!
Background
But before that, I need to talk about myself a bit. I am a software engineering graduate. Yes, pay special attention to the “graduate” part of that sentence. Perhaps you have noticed already, but I am a rather jobless graduate! Had I been employed, I’d have called myself a junior developer! But alas, the stars did not align for me. For, I am but a mere wannabe developer. One year of applying for graduate jobs & programs in my final year bore no fruit, and the year following graduation has opened my eyes to the true difficulty of “getting a foot in the door”!
Not only that, seeing all of my peers getting into those highly competitive graduate programs did little to help my motivation. I must admit, failing to pass a single prerecorded video interview while everyone else passed no problem with no particular thoughts or difficulties dealt a rather significant blow to my confidence. Perhaps I was too delusional and optimistic to think I could pass an interview at all with my flawed character, but I digress.
I then turned to SEEK and LinkedIn for jobs, but to my dismay, the vast majority of jobs either required at minimum 2-3+ years experience for a junior level role, or they required a truly extensive and jaw dropping list of requirements! And in the first place, a “junior level” role was already akin to looking for a needle in the haystack here in the land down under!
The Next Course of Action
As the end of the year approached, I found myself at a crossroads. Clearly, what I have been doing so far is not working. Something needs to change. But what? I weighed up my options:
- Continue my futile job search in the sea of senior dev positions on SEEK and LinkedIn
- Give up and look for another job that suited my personality – I was considering a warehouse job
- Return to university and study something else that had more promising job prospects, after all, I was still rather young and still had time on my side
During that time, one of my applications received a response – It was a rejection. However, the CTO at the time offered to give feedback on my application. Perhaps it was simply an automated response, I do not know, but since the offer was there, I thought I might as well take it. So I did.
And the response I received was well, understandable. I had applied for a position which even I knew that I was clearly not qualified for: Minimum 2-3 years’ experience with a deep understanding of Angular, and experience in GIS applications desirable. I ticked none of those boxes. In fact, I had only applied because there was nothing else I could apply for, and I had to fulfill my Centrelink obligations somehow.
But they were generous enough to take the time to look through my resume and application and give feedback. There was a variety of advice given, but one thing that resonated was creating tutorials or guides to show enthusiasm, which is important as a dev with no experience.
More specifically, it was “guides”, “tutorials”, and “knowledge sharing” that triggered something in me. I thought of all the personal projects I’d completed in the past, and remembered the struggles of google searching endlessly for a simple solution. Then I thought to myself, this knowledge that I have… Even if I fail to become a software dev, this knowledge could help someone in the future. So a blog could be a good way to both document this knowledge for myself and others.
WordPress and Blogging
So I looked into WordPress, the most widely used CMS for blogging, and browsed through the themes available to find one that fit my purpose.
But I hated doing things half-heartedly. While I would love if there was a theme that fit my needs and tastes perfectly, there was none. Although there was one that came close, it was still missing crucial features, but at some point, I figured it was time to tinker around and see if I could tweak it to my needs. After all, creating one from ground up was far too large of a project for me when I was strapped for time.
So after diving headfirst into the WordPress CMS and tweaking some themes with my limited knowledge of WordPress themes, here I am!
Although I must say, I spent more time thinking of a site name and pseudonym than I’d expected. Having names that actually mean something is quite important after all. It’s not a matter of preference. It’s a matter of principle.
The Future
From here, I plan on documenting the things that tripped me up during my projects, and how I solved them. While I am not a senior developer with extensive and deep software development experience, I hope that what I write will be helpful to other hapless and struggling devs who happen to find themselves in the same position as myself in their journey.
Let this be a record of the negligible knowledge which I have accumulated before hopes and dreams are buried.
But they say everything is about perspective. Perhaps this ending is just the beginning of something else.
So with that, I’ll conclude my first blog post here.
This is Kudarc Ensamhet, signing off.
