This week the panel talks with a UK boot camp student about her decision to switch careers and learn to program. They discuss unique challenges such as being part of an underrepresented group and entering the field during a pandemic. Additionally, they discuss technology choices and overall, seek to gain a deeper understanding of the state of JavaScript for new developers.

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AIMEE_KNIGHT: Hello and welcome to another episode of JavaScript JavaScript. On our panel today we have Dan Shapir. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Hello from Tel Aviv. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Steve Edwards. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Hello from Portland. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Myself coming from Nashville as usual. And our guest today is Laura Harvey. Do you want to introduce yourself?

LAURA_HARVEY: Hey, yeah, so I'm Laura from the UK. I'm currently a software engineering student and AVID career switcher. AVID career switcher. 

 

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AIMEE_KNIGHT: So we were talking a little bit about this before. Definitely give us like an intro into what you used to do before. What made you decide to, you know, give this a go? 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, so I've always felt like I wasn't fulfilled in my job. So I've switched loads. So started off working in McDonald's, did that for a couple of years while I was in college. And then I went and worked with adults with disabilities, then children with disabilities. And then I moved into payroll and HR. And I guess I stayed there for quite a few years doing different jobs and mostly focused on the system side of payroll and HR, making sure that the systems were working correctly but not very techy at all. And in May this year, I got a new job as a consultant. So it was basically going out and implementing the software and teaching clients how to use it. And by sort of mid May, I was bored already. So I started to look online for courses to keep me entertained. And that's when I came across a free five day challenge. It was like a coding challenge with Code Institute. And I just basically fell in love with it and then moved on to Free Code Camp. And that led me to want to go to bootcamp. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Awesome. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Dan. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh, no. So I just wanted to make sure that I follow. So what you're saying is that you literally had no programming background whatsoever before you started that.

LAURA_HARVEY: No, none at all. I knew it was something that I was interested in, but I just felt like you needed a degree or to study very heavily in order to get sort of move into the tech industry. So no, no experience whatsoever. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: That's awesome. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh, we keep bumping each other. I just wanted to ask if growing up when you were a teen or during your college days were you into stuff like maybe gaming or were you online a lot? Social networks etc or or not. 

LAURA_HARVEY: No, not at all. I mean when I was in School me and my friend would lock ourselves in his room pretty much all summer and play theme hospital. But that's as far as gaming went for me I think as a teenager I was quite into design but it never progressed into anything more than that and I use technology just in my day-to-day work, but I was never really obsessed with it. It wasn't something that I did as a hobby. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: That's interesting because I know for me, the same thing, I didn't even have a computer when I was starting teaching myself to program or my own computer. You hear people who started messing around with MySpace or that kind of thing way back when and then fell out and then fell back in. But I would say that seems to be more often the case. You don't hear a lot of people who are like first discovering it for the very first time later in life. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm 29, so to discover something new at 29, I almost felt like it wasn't gonna happen for me. And I just thought I would be bored forever. But then when I started the Free Code Camp and 100 Days of Code. I was on Twitter and I was following people who had made the career switch later in life and it was really inspiring and that definitely encouraged me to continue with it. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Kind of the same case for me. I think I talked about it on an episode not too long ago. We used to listen to somebody named Katrina Owen and she was an acrobat before she got into programming and I always thought that was super cool. Do you think that it was more, I'm kind of curious, do you think you didn't really consider it because of maybe the reasons you were mentioning about you thought you'd have to go to school and all that, or do you think it's more a case of like, it wasn't really something that was discussed for you growing up with your family or something like that? 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, I think it's both. I think in school, when I did IT, it was like the first, few years where IT had actually been introduced into senior schools and examinations. So my exam for IT in school was to build a website using PowerPoint. So that's like the extent of IT in school and I know my friend who I grew up with, he is a backend programmer and you know so obviously something clicked for him but I wonder if that's because he's male and generally I think you know females in the tech industry is still, oh, what's the word? There's still not much diversity in the tech industry. And I think I read an article recently about that the women in tech, the number is actually declining rather than increasing. So yeah, it's definitely something that I've never been encouraged to look into. And also myself, I knew that I wasn't good at studying. I'd attempted uni twice before and sort of quit after a year because it just wasn't what I expected at all. So I didn't want to go through that again. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I'd love for you, if you can, based on what you were just sharing, if there are other women out there who are considering this, have you had a positive experience? Are there things that you wish were different? By and large, how has your experience been? Would you encourage other women to do it, or are there things that have not been good?

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, there are things that have not been good, but I wouldn't discourage. I'd really like to, once I get sort of deeper into my career, to make a point of encouraging women and girls to get into tech. I think for me, I've just, it's been the last few weeks, I've had a couple of negative comments on Twitter where they've said that my success is due to my good looks. And I think that makes me feel really uncomfortable because to me the two are completely unrelated and that's not the way that I see myself. And I think that's still a view, there are companies where if you're a woman in a senior leadership position, people assume that you've perhaps been promiscuous in order to get there. And I think that that view is gonna be hard to sort of iron out, but overall a really positive experience. And even when I've spoken about these negative comments on social media, people have been so supportive and said, no Laura, I follow you because you share XYZ content. And they say, don't stop and they keep encouraging. So yeah, I really wanna see more women get into tech 

DAN_SHAPPIR: you're keeping your cool about this much more than than I well nobody would blame me for being handsome but you're keeping your cool about this much more than I I mean when I saw that comment that was these comments I saw some of these comments that were made towards you and it really really upset me a lot uh I it just shocks me that that people in this, some people in this industry, I say, I guess people in general, but also in this industry feel like it's a legitimate way to express themselves. I just don't get it. Literally upset me a lot. And I have to say that I actually invite, I'm the one who invited you on the show and I kind of encountered you through the your online presence to the fact that you're documenting your journey and that you're encouraging other people, other women, but other people in general to pursue a similar path. And I found that to be very uplifting and encouraging. And like I said, when I saw comments like those, it really upset me a lot. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Thank you. Yeah, it was really hard. And I think it's struck a chord with me and people were saying, you know, ignore it, but you need to call it out, I think. I think it's important that we start saying, you know, this isn't right, you can't say this to females, you know, and I don't think any of my male counterparts would have encountered such comments, you know, and people sort of, even after my original post where someone had asked me whether my following was growing on good looks or content. And one of the replies to that thread was that it impacts my branding negatively if I call out these people. And that just says everything to me, you know, that we've still got a lot of work to do. Because if somebody doesn't want to perhaps hire me or follow me because I call out these people then they're not really people that I want to know or associate with, so yeah. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I understand the feeling. I've had people accuse me of getting jobs for my incredible good looks over the years too. And anyway, I'm kidding. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I worry, Steve, like separate things, like not just women, but I don't know. And maybe this is for another time. Like there's ageism also, but we'll talk about that later. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: I mean, I've never understood this. You know, I've watched sort of sat back and watched and the attacks that women get for being an IT. And, you know, I think back over my career over 25, you know, 25 years and some of the best coworkers I've ever had, the people that I keep in touch with this day have been women. And, you know, I just had one email from a former job, go to her employer and say, Hey, we need to hire this guy. He's really good. And I'm like, I just, I don't get it. I've never understood it. Usually I think when people go after somebody like that, oh, you only got your job because you're good looks or whatever. I tend to think it's because of their own insecurities. They're insecure in themselves. And so, then they find some reason to attack somebody else. It's typical bullying is what it is. But yeah, I've never understood that. I'm waiting for a good explanation. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I think that- 

STEVE_EDWARDS: It will probably never come. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. I think there are two factors here. First of all, we like to think that somehow in IT, because we deal with advanced stuff and advanced technologies, that we are somehow ourselves more advanced. And the fact is that very often we're not. It's just like regular people. And unfortunately, regular people are often bigoted and not nice and then have prejudices, etc. And I think that in particular, for various minorities, it's especially challenging in the IT field because the IT field has historically been associated with a particular type of people, like fairly young, white guys. And if you don't fall into any of these categories because maybe you're not white or you're not a guy or you're not young, then it's more challenging, I think. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I'm kind of curious. I have a question for Laura and like totally say to like if you know, you know, you don't like feel like you want to answer a question or be the right question, you can totally pass to but um, you know, I received advice like when I first got into it, and I definitely like took that to heart but I'm curious if you feel like you've been able to be yourself or if there are like parts of your personality that you've kind of I think for lack of better words, hidden or stuff like that, to try to fit a more acceptable mold. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah. I think I'm a very honest person. So I will likely answer most questions. So you're OK. Yes. So because I'm this open person and I'm very straightforward, I never change myself depending on a scenario or a situation. And I wonder if that's how I've connected with such a large audience in a small time is by being so genuine and honest about the type of person I am. I'm certainly not scared or I don't want to hide away or try to fit in and that's never been me. And I think overall, everyone has been really welcoming and supportive of that. And nobody has advised me otherwise, other than somebody who tried the other day. But yeah, that's why we're talking about it now. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I say that because I know like, um, the advice that I received was, you know, to try to dress pretty much like non-attractive, you know, wear t-shirts, wear looser jeans, you know, wear flats, tennis shoes, keep your hair up. Don't wear makeup. Um. And it wasn't until later in my career that I decided to dress up a little bit as I was speaking or something like that. I'm naturally more of the athletic kind of person, so it wasn't too far of a stretch. But even like we were talking about before we got on the call and Dan made a comment about my camera being at a weird angle, I purposely still to this day try to blend in as much as I can. I don't know, maybe not as much as I used to, but I have my camera up more around my neck so that if I'm having like a v-neck on or something like that, like I don't have a bra strap showing or you know, anything, you know, potentially a wardrobe malfunction or something like that. So, but if I was like on a call with my friend, you know, I'm going to obviously not want to like expose anything crazy, but I'm going to be a little less cautious. Like if I go to the gym, like, you know, my sports bra might be showing or something. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, that that's just crazy to me. And, and I don't want it to be that way for people. I don't think I'll be doing that unless, you know, it's a specific request from an employer. But yeah, I think we need to normalize it, you know, wardrobe malfunctions and all, maybe not the worst of them, but a little bra- 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah, I see what you're saying. Shouldn't be a problem. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, I totally agree. We have a benefit in our fields that we don't have to dress up. In fact, very often we tend to dress down in this industry. So it seems to me that everybody should be, should feel comfortable about dressing the way that they find the most comfortable. Just seems obvious to me. One thing that I wanted to ask you, which kinds of veers us away a little bit. So when you got into tech, when you chose tech, you also chose front-end. Why is that? Is that just because that was the obvious choice or the easiest choice or were you specifically attracted to front-end development? What brought you here? 

LAURA_HARVEY: I think I'm still undecided on that. I'm very lucky in that I'm still very early days in my career so I can afford to still be undecided. I think I really like front-end because I love the creativity and it goes with my design skills that I learned in college. But also I'm really open to back end. At the moment in bootcamp, we're on week three and we're doing DOM manipulation this week. So we've done HTML, CSS, JavaScript. So we're still on front end and I'm quite looking forward to learning more about the back end. Because who knows, I could change my mind. But at the moment, definitely leaning towards the creativity of a front end. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: What will your back end be? I'm curious what people are doing now. 

LAURA_HARVEY: See, we haven't had an official syllabus, if you like. So I believe it's Python and Ruby. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: OK. Oh, so you're doing both. That's cool. Yes. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I might even say that it's a little bit even needless. Choose one or the other. Yes, yep.Too bad we don't have AJ here to say that you should be using Go or something. Go. Yeah. Or Node, the advantage. Well, it's an interesting question at this early stage. And to be honest, I'm a bit undecided on that, whether or not it's beneficial to focus on a particular programming language and learn that language as much as possible especially given the JavaScript is a multi-paragraphed, Digmatic programming language, or that it's actually beneficial to study, as I said, two or maybe even three programming languages and then gain broader experience of how the programming field looks like. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, and I think that's the whole sort of boot camp idea, if you like, because they are so short and you've got a lot of knowledge squeezed into it. Time they're saying, you know, we're not going to teach you the ins and outs of a language. We're going to teach you how to learn. And so I think that's actually the more important thing is to change your mindset so that you've got a growth mindset and also how you might go about learning a new language so that it opens you up to learn anything in the future. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: How long is this bootcamp supposed to be?

LAURA_HARVEY: So it's 12 weeks with two weeks career support at the end of that 12 weeks. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And how many hours? Sorry, I just wanted to like grasp the scope. How many days a week? How many hours a day? 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah. So we do Monday to Friday, 9.30 till around 4.30. Sometimes it goes on till five and then you're expected to do. I'd say probably two to three hours homework in the evenings. Um, and then you get weekend homework, which is slightly longer. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: How would you say, I'm, you know, I haven't really talked to anybody outside of the U S but you mentioned like career prep and stuff like that. How do you feel like the market is for junior developers right now in other parts of the world? And how is it specifically by you?

LAURA_HARVEY: I think it's okay at the moment. I mean, I've been talking to a talent acquisition specialist in the US who was trying to contact their UK team in order to get me to speak to one of the hiring managers in the UK, but they're saying that they've got a hiring freeze. Obviously, we are in a near recession in the UK, so that's gonna make things harder. I think it's a case of now there are, there's still a lot of jobs, but there's more people going for those jobs. But I think definitely there was during lockdown, there was a bit of a slower moving recruitment process for previous bootcamp grads, but they've definitely seen improvements in the last couple of months. So I'm just hoping by the time I finish recruitment will be back in full swing. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: One thing that I can comment in this context, is something that I'm seeing from the perspective of my employer, which is Wix, is that the current situation with COVID and whatnot is pushing a lot of businesses online. As a result, a lot of businesses are either establishing an online presence or revamping their online presence, enhancing their online presence, adding e-commerce capabilities, etc. And this does create opportunities in our field even if the market as a whole, as you said, is in something of a recession. So that something that may play in your favor. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, definitely. I think my mum and dad were really worried because I quit a reasonably well paying job in order to attend bootcamp. And they were sort of saying, you know, but you do realize, you know, COVID and recession and everybody's out of work. And I said, but that's pushing everybody online and remote working and so they need IT professionals. And I think it's still gonna be sought after because more companies are gonna be looking for more ways to work better remotely. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: As I said, I definitely agree with that. And in fact, I actually see that in practice. As I said, my employer Wix is actually, you know, for us, it's literally the best it's ever been from a financial and business perspective as much as I can say, no investment advice or whatever, but we're doing really well. And it's exactly because of this thing that is pushing businesses to be more online. So I wanted to ask, so you were describing a very full, very aggressive workload. I mean, you're talking about, what is it? Essentially nine hours a day, excluding the homework, plus home homework, more homework on the weekends. That's pretty intense. How are you holding up? 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, it's intense. I mean, yesterday around nine o'clock PM, I wanted to launch my laptop out of the window, but I managed to hold it together and get what I was working on working. So yeah, it's tough, but I have cleared my schedule of all other things so that I have less to stress about. And I think they are very good at saying, you know, we don't want you to spend your life doing homework. If you at least make an attempt on it, then that makes us feel comfortable that you're trying and maybe, you know, you're learning the concepts, you're just not quite getting there on 100%, but you will pick it up with the weekend homework they said just make sure you have at least one day where you do no computer work whatsoever. I think this weekend was optional homework so that was nice. I had a code-free weekend which I've not had in about three four months so yeah totally alien at the moment. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Any advice that you can give Amy about this? 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah so for me. I don't know. It was kind of all out 100% of the time, but that's a little bit my personality too. I don't know. I'm not good at breaks and rest. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, I'm the same. And so I've really had to force myself to take it easy rather than going all out at the moment. Learning concepts that I've previously gone over on my own, but it's quite nice to take it that bit easier. And then the real work starts once they introduce new concepts. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah. That said, or, you know, I've said before, like hammock driven development, just kind of stepping away and letting your brain rest. You know, you can kind of solve things in the background and, and then, you know, too, if you do feel like you can keep going, like things like maybe you're doing review type stuff, like, you know, instead of using like an editor, use them or something like that to kind of. I don't know. Keep keep it challenging, even though if you're doing review. Is that the kind of advice you're meaning, Dan? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, I don't know. My background is very different, as I think you know. I will say, though, that some of my best programming I've done in the shower. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yep. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So yeah, so stepping away can definitely help a lot occasionally. And some of my arguments with Amy over the years have been that she needs to step away from development more than she does. I do think though, Laura, that you're definitely at a different stage of your career. I do think that you're at the stage where you do need to push yourself, obviously not burn out and not get to the point where you're starting to dislike this new field that you're getting into. But, but definitely you do need to push yourself, I think. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, definitely. I think it's all, it's all balance. You know, I, when I was self-teaching and I was still working full-time, I was writing like one blog post a week, I was making videos and I did come close to burnout and I just felt really miserable for about a week. So I think I've recognized in myself when I need to take a break and it's just making sure that I look after myself as well as work hard. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And you're studying remotely, right? Especially given the current situation.

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, so it's Zoom. So we're on Zoom all day, except for one hour for lunch and little 15 minute breaks here and there. But there's 23 of us in the class and we all sit on Zoom with the tutor and two teaching assistants. And then, so we do 45 minute lessons and then we have a lab where we are put into breakout rooms. And then we work in pairs or threes to sort of come up with a solution to a problem. 

 

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DAN_SHAPPIR: I do think that the challenge with the remote working and remote studying actually, what I wanted to say, although I guess it's also true for remote working. And it doesn't really matter whether it's a bootcamp or colleges, a college, because I know that a lot of colleges have started to do now remote work, studying as well because of the situation. I think that the lack of face-to-face camaraderie that you can share your experiences, not just in the context of the classroom, but you know walking into the classroom or out of the classroom or sitting outside or whatever eating lunch and sharing the challenges is something that is missing in this type of a learning experience. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, we were commenting on it just the other day actually and saying how sad it is that, you know, when we take lunch, everybody just disappears off to go and get their lunch. They don't sit down and get to know one another. They need a break away from the screen, but that also means that we're not socializing with each other. And I think that's really missing. But for me personally, I really love being at home. I'm a bit of a home bird. So I really enjoy being in my own space and being able to. I guess learn at my own pace because I don't feel, I feel like the pressure is off with Zoom rather than being in class and not understanding something that might sound a bit strange, but I definitely feel like it's more comfortable for me working remotely. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And when you do run into a concept or problem or something like that, which you find difficult to grasp or comprehend. What do you do? How do you go about it? How do you break through? 

LAURA_HARVEY: Perseverance, like we were saying before, taking a break, just going for a wander because sometimes the solution can come to you. The teaching assistants are really good. They are bootcamp grads, if you like, who went through the last cohort. So they're on board to support the tutor and you can get hold of them on Slack. So if you get really stuck they are on hand, like even at nine o'clock last night when I wanted to cry. So that's good. But yeah, it is breaking down the problem, I think, and console logging everything. Because JavaScript for me is still really tough in knowing whether what I'm trying to do is actually ever gonna work. So definitely just console log everything and hope for the best. It was a soundboard or like a drum kit. And when you clicked a particular div, a sound played. So I got to a point where the same sound was playing no matter which div I clicked. And I couldn't get my head around how to almost like loop through the audio file so that a different audio file was linked to a different div. In the end, it turned out that you needed to create a template literal of the target ID. And the ID contained the last part of the audio file. And so therefore every time that div was collected, it completed the audio file source and the audio played. So yeah, that's, that's what I got stuck on. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: So I'm glad that you managed to, to work your way through. It kind of reminds me of something that happened to somebody that I knew actually in the university where we were tasked with implementing a calculator in assembly language. And due to a bug that he had, whatever, regardless of whatever input was provided, it always outputted zero. So, when he handed over the exercise, the examples that he handed over were 3 minus 3, 2 times zero and four plus minus four, something like that. Unfortunately for him, the examiner actually noticed the bug. So yeah, it didn't help. But yeah, breaking through challenges and breaking through bugs is our bread and butter. It is what we do throughout our entire career.

AIMEE_KNIGHT:  I'm curious on the front end side, are you using a framework or are they doing just vanilla JavaScript and how deeply they get into that? 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, so at the moment we have just and vanilla JavaScript. So last week we worked through functions, arrays, objects and classes. So we spend about one day on each subject if you like. So one day on arrays, one day on functions and that's you know class, work and labs as well. And then this week it's all about DOM manipulation. So yesterday we did like an intro to DOM and DOM events. And then today we've been doing like time intervals and timeouts and, and set intervals. And I think we're going to move on to frameworks later on in the course. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Do you know, are they doing React, Vue? 

LAURA_HARVEY: I think it's React. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Okay. Sounds about right. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah. I just wanted to say that almost any problem with JavaScript can be solved with a set timeout zero.

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Please no. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Okay, I'll remember that one. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: One tick of the event loop. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Please don't. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Yeah, one tick of the event loop, all you need. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I was mostly kidding. So, I'm curious, do you have any written material or online documentation? I mean, when you study a particular concept, is there documentation that you go back to review if you need to? How does it work? 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, so we have a GitHub enterprise account. So it's like a special private GitHub for general assembly. And all of the classwork and homework is done with sort of pull requests and things like that. And there are also textbooks, which you can access through the GitHub as well. So they're all basically readmes. And then the in lecture, if you like, the tutor will go through a concept, he'll code it out and talk through how it works and then he shares that code into the classwork folder and then you pull that down from from GitHub onto your machine and so you have that to work from and then the lab is related to that. So the lab that we do, which are the activities, they're always like a little bit more complex than what was gone over in class. And you have to use, you know, a conjunction of the classwork, the textbook and Google or your own knowledge to solve that sort of lab. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Was there an assumption ahead of the course that you're familiar with Git or GitHub or was that something that they actually taught you at the beginning?

LAURA_HARVEY: No, that's why I really liked General Assembly, because I found that other boot camps that I applied for, their application or their sort of entry requirements were much harder. And it felt like I had to basically teach myself JavaScript before I'd even paid for the course. Whereas with GA, they started everything from the very basics and in the pre-course material that we had to work on before the course started. There was a whole module on Git and GitHub. And then we went through it in class as well on our first day. And so for the first sort of week, we submitted our homework as a group to make sure that we were comfortable with how that worked. Another thing that they went through in a lot of detail is using the terminal as well, because I know that that's quite a challenge. Oh, it certainly was for me. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, we're all...I mean, most users are just used these days to drag and drop, I guess, and windowed interface and less to using it for using a terminal. And what were you, what are you using as the IDE or development environment or editor or whatever? 

LAURA_HARVEY: So we're using visual studio code, which I was using myself anyway, for sort of personal projects. So that's nice because I know how it works. But also we did on the, I think it was the first afternoon, we did what was called install fest. And it was basically we went through and installed all the things like BS code and get and stuff like that. And basically got it all set up and they told us extensions that they wanted us to download and some other bits that I still can't comprehend what we actually did, but they guided you through it all. And so now, It's the linter is how they want it and all sorts. And they tell you what extensions to install at particular points to make your life easier. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And what are you using as a web server? It's just like a GitHub pages or whatever it's called or something else. Do you know? 

LAURA_HARVEY: No, we haven't moved on to that yet. So from Thursday this week is our first project. And then we'll be using GitHub pages. And I think there's another one. See, I use Netlify, but they mentioned another sort of hosting service that we'll use later in the course. But for this project, project one, we'll be using GitHub pages. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, if you're using GitHub, it makes sense. And how's it going so far for you? You enjoying it? Is it what you expected it to be? Is it easier or more difficult than you expected? 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, I'm really loving it so far. I think for me, because I did the sort of three to four months beforehand where I was learning myself. I was getting up at five in the morning and I was coding through to nine o'clock when I started work and then I'd go through my lunch hour and then I would cope in the evening until bedtime. So it's given me like some more free time, I think, because I'm coding all day and I feel like I'm working towards making my dream a reality. So yeah, I'm loving it. I'm loving being able to sort of bounce ideas off of other people as well, because I think learning on your own can get really lonely sometimes. If you can't quite grasp the concept and the explanation on Google is not quite good enough, you're sort of stuck. And I ended up having to go to Twitter, whereas now I've got people that I can sort of write to and say, oh, hey, how does this work? I think so far, it's been less intense than I was expecting extremely stressful from day one, but I can see now it's ramping up, like the homeworks are getting slightly longer, slightly more complicated, but yeah, definitely loving it and it is the best choice I've ever made, so yeah. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: You have the best attitude, I'm so happy to hear that is going well for you. You seem like positive, you don't seem like, you know, fazed at all by anything, so it's good to hear.

LAURA_HARVEY: Thank you. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I have a cat going nuts in the background. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Don't worry, it's usually my dog, so we're lucky today. I think it's really important to have the right attitude about because sort of early on when I moved to JavaScript the first time I really struggled on my own and I almost gave up. I spent about a week sort of wallowing in self-pity. So definitely changing my attitude and looking at it more as an opportunity has really helped. And there's sort of a, I think it's a video that you're asked to watch before bootcamp about having a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset where you believe that you were only good at something if you are naturally skilled. And I think that really helped as well.

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I love that. That's kind of the mindset that that Katrina Owen that I spoke about earlier had and it really helped me because I always thought, you know, I wasn't good enough, smart enough, which, you know, probably contributed to my, you know, hours put in and probably still does to this day. But, you know, I enjoy it too. So it's a balance. But yeah, I love that mindset. I really do think anybody can do it. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: And just in case anybody's not aware, Amy is an international keynote speaker about software stuff these days. Yeah, at least when people can travel. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I never thought I'd miss it, but I actually do. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I miss it a lot. With all, you know, there's, there are all the online conferences, but it's just not the same thing. Anyway, so you were talking about how beneficial it is that you're able to learn in a group and get support when you're stuck from, you said, the instructors and instructor assistants and..And I definitely agree that that's a really important thing because I do think that one, I think we also spoke about it with Danny Thompson when he was on the show because he also started studying on his own. And I do think, agree that it's a really big challenge to, at least certainly when you're starting, to learn and grasp new concepts when you've got nobody to consult with.

 

And you said that you found a lot of assistance on Twitter. So I think that's excellent. That's one of the better users of Twitter that I've heard so far. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, I love that about Twitter. I think there's a few of my projects, which I could call joint efforts with the Twitter community because I would get stuck and as I say, I haven't got any sort of friends who developers and the only network I sort of knew was Twitter. And so, and I'm not shy in asking for help. So I just thought, you know, what's the worst that could happen? And people are so helpful. And I think it also shows that there's never one solution to a problem because everybody who commented would say something different. And I'm sure they would all work, but yeah, it's really great to be able to have that support and be able to resolve the issue rather than getting down in the dumps and not being able to finish the project. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I'm also really happy that you're documenting your journey both on Twitter and in a blog and also on videos. I think from what I've seen it was really helpful for you yourself and it's certainly encouraging to other people out there who are in similar situations. How did you start going about that?

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I'm going to add it's quite brave, especially, I don't know, for me. I'm terrified of the videos. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah. So I think I start by saying that before Twitter, I was terrified of social media as a whole, and it was only through sort of doing the hundred days of code and reaching out to people on them, I sort of built that confidence. I started first blogging about. Well, it was topics that I found really challenging that I felt like weren't explained properly anywhere. And I wanted to put them in a no jargon way. So my first one was on Git and GitHub. And I think that did really well because all of the guides that you see are sort of bitty. You know, they're like, oh, they start in the middle. They say CD to the correct directory. And you're like, I don't, you've lost me already. And that's like the first line of the of the tutorial really. So I started with those guides, I wrote a few of those and then I think people got to know me through my writing and they wanted to learn more about my journey. So that was a really tough one to write, the first one, because I don't like writing about myself. But also, another thing that people had commented on my blog post was that, you know, they're not readers. They would much rather than the content in a video. And so I thought with my journey, that was a really good one because I could do a sort of longer version on the blog and then a shorter version on the video. And I just sort of give it a go. Yeah, I enjoyed it. I still get a bit nervous sitting in front of the camera, but I do manage to, you know, talk through things on my own, which is good. And also documenting my journey through bootcamp, I think there's nothing you know, people document it and it gets a bit lost. So I wanted to create a channel, if you like, where people could go and they could see what a day at bootcamp is like and really learn what it's like and what it's gonna entail. Because I think you know what bootcamp should be like, but not what it's actually like. And you can speak to people you know, alumni and stuff and they'll say, oh yeah, it's really good. We did this, that and the other, but not how the course is structured or anything like that. And that's what I really want to sort of cover. I want to be able to, if people are considering it, I want to encourage them to do it because it is just massive for me personally. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Yeah, cool. Like I said, I found your videos and also your tweets and your blogs to be inspirational. So good for you for doing all of that. And I really think that, you know, we had Morad on our show a couple of episodes back talking about building our personal brand. And I do think that this will actually help you in your career. Even being on the air and saying something like, I don't know this yet, I'm studying this. You know, some people might think that that's not a good thing because you're admitting ignorance about certain topics. And I wholeheartedly disagree with that attitude. I think that by putting yourselves out there in this way, you're building your brand as somebody who's learning and advancing themselves. I think that this is something that people, at least the type of people that you want to work for and work with are looking for in people in tech. And I do think that you will find this helpful in your career.

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, I hope so. And we had a similar discussion at Bootcamp the other day. So every other Thursday, I think, is we have an outcome session and they're the teams that help you in being like job ready. They tell you to, you know, build your personal brand statement, get LinkedIn and Twitter, like working for you. And one of the girls at Bootcamp sort of commented, you know, I feel like a fraud when I share things on social media because I don't know about the subject. And, you know, because I've had some success with it, I sort of said, well, you know, that's how I felt too, but just don't think of it in that way and think of it as in I'm doing this for myself. And also it might help just one other person. And that's, I think, really important when you're speaking, you know, even if it just inspires one person, that's enough. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Awesome. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: I totally agree.

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Laura, is there anything before we wrap up that you would want to share or I guess, you know, good ways for people to follow you and then we'll move into pics? 

LAURA_HARVEY: Sure. So I'm most active on Twitter, which is at Laura C. Harvey. I'm also on LinkedIn, which you can get through my Twitter as well. So yeah, that's all I want to say. Thanks.

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Awesome. Well, I'm sure I know I do, and I'm sure the rest of us all wish you like the absolute best of luck, and we'll be excited to see what all you do. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Thank you, and thanks for having me. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Totally. 

 

Hey folks, this is Charles Maxwood, and over the last few years, I've gotten to know a lot of great people within the Microsoft community, and specifically in the.NET area. One of our guests from JavaScript Jabber, Sean Clavo, actually reached out to me and said he wanted to start a show on.NET. There are a ton of people out there that I feel like sometimes get neglected in the.NET space. If you're one of those folks, you've been listening to maybe one or two of the other.NET focused or Microsoft focused podcasts for a while and thought, well, where's the devchat.tv style podcasts for me in.NET, you can find it. It's at adventuresin.net, dotnet is spelled out D-O-T-N-E-T, adventuresin.net.com, go check it out today. 

 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Dan, you want to go first? 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Okay. So we were talking about technical Twitter and Laura mentioned how helpful it was for her. I actually want to highlight both the good side and the bad side of technical Twitter. So I'll actually start with the good side. I learned something new about JavaScript today and not a totally new feature that's only going to be part of JavaScript like in two or three years, but something that you can already do in Chrome. Last week we were talking about things that the JavaScript developers must know and we argued about regular expressions and I learned something about regular expressions today from Ken C. Dodds who's got who's on Twitter and who is awesome and the thing that I learned was something called named groups in regular expressions. It turned out that in regular expressions you can put things in parentheses and it's called groups and they can get match or sub-matches and they are usually listed as array entries on or sort of like array entry on the return match value if it's not null and it turns out that you can actually assign names to them and then you can look at the match.groups dot whatever the name is and get that sub-match. It's totally awesome having things named rather than looking at them via just their, you know, whatever happens to be their index or location within that regular expression makes everything much more readable. It's excellent. I'll actually share the link to this tweet on the show notes. And like I said, I really love it when I learned something totally new for me about JavaScript. So that's the good part. The not so good part is that you do need to be careful when you're learning stuff or taking technical information off of Twitter because sometimes people just post things that are just wrong. And I don't think that they're necessarily doing it intentionally. It's just that they may not know any better. Recently, I'm not going to name names or share a link to that, but someone tweeted a list of answers to JavaScript interview questions, a whole thread about it, and it got hundreds of likes and retweets. And unfortunately, it was full of wrong information. And I'm just, you know, it's so sad that people will be taking information off of this thread and using this in interviews and potentially missing out because they're just getting wrong information off of Twitter. So going back to that Ken C. Dodds example. So obviously Ken C. Dodds is an excellent source for JavaScript information and anything that you get from him is going to be correct. But even then, after I saw his example, I actually opened up JavaScript console and typed it in myself just to verify that it worked and that I understood. And then I went into the MDN and looked it up and read the documentation. And if I think about using it in a project, then I'll probably also look at can I use or something like that just to verify how widely supported it is and that I can actually use it. So even though technical Twitter is awesome and excellent, do be careful and do verify the technical content that you're getting off of it. So those would be my picks.

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah, that's probably true for any type of technical information you get off the internet, whether even, you know, stack exchange, stack overflow, Twitter, you name your source, when anybody can put it out there, then you, you generally need to verify it anyway. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh, I totally agree. I totally agree with what you said. I actually, that was one of the things that I wrote in response to that thread that you need to verify anything that you get off of the internet. That said, I think that certain platforms are more conductive to better critique of information. So if you put something incorrect on Stack Overflow, it will likely get voted down or people will point out the mistake. And Twitter, just because of the way that it works, doesn't really work this way. So you do need to be especially extra careful with something like Twitter. So that concludes my part. So I think that Amy has a bit of a cat emergency. So Steve, how about you go with your pick for picks? 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Hmm. Believe it or not. I've been so heads down. I don't know if I have a pick this week. So yeah, I think I'm gonna pass for this week. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Oh no. 

STEVE_EDWARDS: Yeah. Such is my life. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Well, if you've got a busy life, that's, you know, that's, well, I don't know if it's always a good thing, but it's, uh, it's better than the alternative. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: I can go ahead with mine really quickly. Sorry if I'm out of breath. I'm spicing back. Thank God for Bluetooth headphones. Let's see, AJ popped in really quickly for a second and he wanted me to pick GoReleaser, which looks pretty cool. So I will drop a link for that. And then my other pick as I tried to catch my breath is, so this is probably obviously more for US people, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of these companies open up, you know, to remote people. But It's a blog post I saw on Hacker News this morning about all the Midwestern cities in the United States that are hiring, some of the top cities. So traditionally we think of Silicon Valley, New York, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, which Chicago is on this list, but some others as well. That'll be it for me. Laura, do you want to go? 

LAURA_HARVEY: I'm not sure I have anything. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: How about you share the links to your blog post and to your YouTube channel?

LAURA_HARVEY: Okay, I will share those. 

DAN_SHAPPIR: Awesome. 

AIMEE_KNIGHT: Thank you so much. I guess we will wrap it up and we'll see everybody next week. And thank you again so much for coming on. I hope that we can stay in touch and see how things are going for you. 

LAURA_HARVEY: Yeah, definitely. That'll be great. And thank you again so much for having me. 

 

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