Presented by:

Kate Pond

from Allen Institute for Immunology

Part developer, part interpretive park ranger, & 100% awesome! Coding all the things & loving it!

Over the last year and a half, I've been attempting to complete my career change from a park ranger to a developer. In that year and a half, I have learned Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, and React.js at a coding bootcamp, Swift and XCode an internship, and SQL, ASP.NET, and Typescript during another internship. I've also been introduced to C#, C++, Java, and Python. And even though each time I started a new language felt like my life was going up in flames, over time I started to see the similarities of the languages and found it easier to read programs written in different languages. However, I also started to notice how not having a "specialty" language made me feel like I would never get a job as a developer. It was really important to me during this time to realize that being a jack of all trades, but feeling like a master of none doesn't make a person a failure. It makes that person a master of being flexible and getting up to speed quickly. Here are some tips on keeping your sanity if asked to forget everything you've learned about a language, framework, or tool, and start a new one, and keep moving forward.

What the audience will learn:

  • What I did to get up to speed on new languages, frameworks, and/or tools, including finding and using tutorials, joining communities, and asking colleagues questions.
  • How I used grounding, affirmations, and reaching out to friends and networks to get through tough times of change.

Date:
2019 November 15 - 16:15
Duration:
20 min
Room:
TALKS 3183
Language:
Track:
Programming
Difficulty:
Easy

Happening at the same time:

  1. Security Compliance Testing with Inspec
  2. Start Time:
    2019 November 15 16:15

    Room:
    TALKS 3178

  3. The Tor Project: the state of the Onion
  4. Start Time:
    2019 November 15 16:15

    Room:
    TALKS 3179

  5. Microservices - A Cautionary Tale
  6. Start Time:
    2019 November 15 16:15

    Room:
    TALKS 3180