Career

There are people who can play the piano wonderfully while others can’t even clap in rhythm (me). There are people who can express themselves well and people who cannot deal with the countless thoughts that flow through their brain. There are multiple types of intelligence. In the past few days I have had several philosophical conversations with people of all kinds. A recurring theme was a feeling of inability, of mediocrity, mixed with drops of sadness and a handful of blindness.

Leticia is a Brazilian developer who changed career to web development four years ago. She previously worked as an Oceanographer but caught the coding bug! Now she works as a developer at the payments solution company Stripe. She is a great example of a software engineer without a CS degree who has a successful career.

This month is my 4 year anniversary of my first job as a developer. During this time I’ve had multiple jobs (startups, big companies and open source projects) and changed countries and continents. I was able to learn a couple of things that helped me improve my career and I wanted to share them as a celebration of my anniversary and everything that came with this new life.

The lovely Pyladies-Salvador asked for a text to debut their blog and told me that they would publish it on Women’s Day. I reflected a lot on what to write, what I could somehow add to that day that has so much meaning, and decided that I would like to talk to you about ambition. How ambitious do you consider yourself?

Few months ago I decided to drop my career as an oceanographer and decided to become a backend developer with Python, as I told some of you here. After my blog post circulates on the internet, I got an invitation to talk on the Caipyra conference, in Ribeirão Preto (thanks Marco Rougeth).

This week I was asked to tell a little about how I became programmer (or at least, I’m in the process). I wrote this text to tell a little bit more about my story.

Panel with the London Chapter of Latinas in Tech!

If you ever told me you are learning to code (or anything, really), chances are I told you you should have your blog and write in it.

me•di•o•cre: adj. Of moderate degree or quality; synonym: average

One year ago I started my new job as a Backend Python Developer. I have dropped a career, a profession and I almost drop my master degree. When everything happened, I think I didn’t understand the proportions that decision would have in my life. Now, one year later, I want to tell you a little bit about what happened this year.

I just watched an awesome lecture about how to have a five-digit salary in Brazil by Bruno Ticami (Python Brazil 2013). Here are some questions and advises that he talked about:

I didn’t study computer science in college and I never took a “formal” programming course. Without going into too much detail, I want to reaffirm that, looking at the past, I by no means believe that having gone to another college (different from the profession I have today) was a waste of time. <! - more -> A university teaches many things that you cannot learn by yourself, behind a computer, sinking in a sea of content.

As the years went by, I developed a framework to deal with my impostor syndrome in different scales it occurs. It is not something super complex or with a deep theoretical background, but it worked for me and I’ve been using it for the past year.

Being a software engineer at a new company—anywhere—is hard. The codebase is completely new, you have to adapt to new patterns (for both code and culture) and most likely the problem space is completely new to you too.

Code review is a complicated task and can become overwhelming, specially when you have no idea how to do it. However, code review can be a powerful tool to increase code quality and assure “healthy” deploys.

Hey!

On the last post I have written some tips for those who are starting in the world of programming, but today I want to talk something that happened to me before, and is happening to me now: There is just too much information on the internet! You will say that this is an obvious observation, but when you want to study something, this is just overwhelming!