6 ms·

From coding bootcamp graduate to building distributed databases

114 points by richieartoul 6y ago

thomas_moon 6y ago
While I think its comical that the author casually recommends people to go "speak at conferences", theres some really good advice here. I came out of a Hack Reactor and started pumping out React code for a small startup. After about 6 months, I was bored and decided to take some Bradfield courses just like this article recommends and the experience has been invaluable. Seeing how some "black boxes" work in details has been super illuminating and helpful at times. The core concepts and even just the code I was exposed to moved the needle in terms of my progress quite a bit and also showed me other areas of software engineering I didn't know existed when I got started.
- foolinaround 6y ago
  First time I am hearing about Bradfield courses. What makes them better than the online MOOC courses at Stanford, MIT, etc?
  - richieartoul 6y ago
    I'm biased because I've become great friends with the bradfield founders (Hi Myles and Oz!) since I took all their classes years ago, and recently guest lectured as part of their databases class, but they're basically targeted at working bootcamp graduates that have huge C.S holes in their knowledge. More of a practical focus than what I would imagine you get from online MOOC courses (plus live instruction), but to be honest I haven't taken a lot of MOOC's personally so I may not be the best to compare.
    - dwoot 6y ago
      Richie -- absolutely absolutely stunning and incredible! I thought I was making strides. I've taken two BradfieldCS courses and have had some personal mentoring from Myles even before Bradfield was born. If the original question asker is reading this thread, I can lend some more insight having done MOOCs and Bradfield. First off, Oz and Myles are behind teachyourselfcs.com, one exceptional and concise site which their curriculum is sort of based off of. Oz is also the author behind, "You Are Not Google" that was HUGELY popular on here a couple years back. The thing that Oz and Myles brought was their incredible enthusiasm coupled with their passion for mathematics and computer science. They were practitioners teaching at it from a practitioner's perspective with the goal of providing another practitioner the CS most applicable to their jobs. These courses were in-person in San Francisco for a while (but no longer). Look up either Myles or Oz on Twitter and you'll notice that they're very much still engaged in technical conversations and the computer science and how to teach it today. The one thing I always always took away from the teachyourselfcs.com site is the section under, "Why learn computer science?" > There are 2 types of software engineer: those who understand computer science well enough to do challenging, innovative work, and those who just get by because they’re familiar with a few high level tools. > Both call themselves software engineers, and both tend to earn similar salaries in their early careers. But Type 1 engineers progress toward more fulfilling and well-remunerated work over time, whether that’s valuable commercial work or breakthrough open-source projects, technical leadership or high-quality individual contributions. I have an inkling that Richie, right here, is EXACTLY what they were talking about when drafting this. This blog post exemplifies this. I've learned so much from the both of them, but I can honestly say, Richie, if you're reading this, this was a f*ckin' gem! Would love to grab coffee with you some time once the pandemic's over.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > While I think its comical that the author casually recommends people to go "speak at conferences" Why's that comical? If you have something interesting to say, go for it! Even if you don't, there's no harm in applying. Most people are way more interesting than they think they are.
  - thomas_moon 6y ago
    TIL that you can apply to speak at conferences. I always thought it was an invite only kind of deal haha. Thanks!
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      For example use https://www.cfpland.com/conferences/ https://www.cfpland.com/conferences/ to get a list of CFPs (invitations to submit a talk.)
    - ambrood 6y ago
      I worked at Uber too. Turns out if you work at the right places, it opens doors for you. But yes most conferences have a "request for proposal" system.
    - mindcrime 6y ago
      Yep, the larger and more prestigious conferences may be harder to break into (as they have so many people submitting) but there are smaller conferences that are probably desperately hoping for more people to submit proposals. Or they were before COVID. I'm not sure how the transition to all (or mostly) virtual has affected the conference scene, but that's the way it was in the past. Based on my own experience, I'd say that you can always start out by speaking at local user groups or Meetups, build a resume of talks you've given, then apply to smaller / regional conferences, do a few of those, and ... well, that's where I stopped. All Things Open is the most prominent event I've presented at. But the point is, bootstrap and work your up the ladder. Look at the whole thing holistically too: blogging, putting content on Youtube, open source projects, etc, all go towards building your overall image and presence "out there".
    - 6y ago
maybenotafart 6y ago
I find it interesting how it nopes really complex icebergs
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ramzyo 6y ago
Well-written article and kudos to the author on their career success! One nitpick, the part about comparing possible startup comp in a unicorn exit and as a senior eng at Facebook over an 8 year period is missing the possible tax benefits of the startup comp. Facebook comp will be taxed as ordinary income as the stock is granted as RSUs (basically 40 - 50% in the US in the $500k/year bracket depending on the state you live in), whereas the majority of a $10 million windfall from being an early employee at a startup that exits after 8 years would likely result in at least half of the tax burden if you did it right and the options were ISOs. With a 4 year standard vesting schedule, the majority of options would have vested far before the startup was a unicorn, and the tax burden at time of option exercise may be very low. Assuming then a long term capital gains rate of 15% at time of sale, the comparison to Facebook comp over the same timeline is about 4x in favor of the startup rather than the 2x the article proposed. As the author says, though, the startup route is exceedingly risky and very highly likely not to come out ahead.
- richieartoul 6y ago
  This is a fair point, I didn’t even think to consider the different tax implications. Thanks for pointing this out!
  - ramzyo 6y ago
    Don’t mention it! Nice article and again kudos to you on the career success.
- wocram 6y ago
  Then you would also need to include the potentially much worse outcome of paying taxes on the equity and having it later become worthless.
  - ramzyo 6y ago
    Yes, the author captures this in their analysis as a risk variable.
- sokoloff 6y ago
AriseAndPass 6y ago
I wish the author went into more detail about how to come up with "high leverage side projects" that help cultivate the type of fundamental CS knowledge he emphasises. Most of the suggestions I see for potential side projects are for some kind of consumer-facing (web/mobile/desktop) app - probably because most people in this context are prioritising the potential of generating side income, but this sounds more like what the author calls "plumbing" style backend/API work rather than something that would develop fundamental CS skills. So, any ideas? I've seen https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x which is a great collection of ideas all based on piercing an abstraction by building your own version of lower-level tools. Are there any other categories of side project that someone who wants to move technically deeper than a full-stack web app would do well to consider?
- richieartoul 6y ago
  (Author here) Nand2tetris is pretty awesome if you don’t already have strong CS fundamentals and feel like you “know how computers work”. If you had a good C.S education though you may not get much out of it. Here is a cool one I worked on awhile ago when I wanted to learn more about foundationDB: https://github.com/richardartoul/tsdb-layer https://github.com/richardartoul/tsdb-layer A long time ago I wanted to learn about regular expression engines so I wrote a tiny one: https://github.com/richardartoul/regex-engine https://github.com/richardartoul/regex-engine I built this with some friends a few years ago: https://hyperdash.io/ https://hyperdash.io/ (building the backend for this was a good learning experience and I learned a lot about writing multi threaded software making the python SDK). Those are just some examples to give you an idea, but to be honest it’s hard to give a good answer because side projects are deeply personal. It takes serious discipline and motivation to spend your nights and weekends writing code when that’s how you spend your working hours as well, so it’s really gonna be about what motivates you and will keep you engaged while also gaining “high leverage” skills (anything fundamental in the realm of networking, compilers, databases, data structures, etc. basically anything that’s not just another language or framework)
  - AlchemistCamp 6y ago
amw-zero 6y ago
Can someone explain the trend of fetishizing the “bootcamp fairytale” whereby someone doesn’t have a CS background but ends up as a working programmer after going to a bootcamp? Let me explain. I didn’t study CS in college, but I did stud CE, a relatively related field. When I started working as a programmer, I immediately felt that there were some fundamentals I was missing, so I’ve spent a lot of time reading in my spare time to fill in some of those gaps. There seems to be a trend where someone switches careers, and glorifies the fact that they don’t have a CS background. Why dismiss the history of the field that you’re in? Not everyone has a PhD in CS, but there has been some incredibly important work done in the field, work that we all stand on the shoulders of. Is this an ego thing? It’s hard to be humble and admit that you have a lot of things to learn, so instead you resent the field and blame it for being arrogant?
- mkl95 6y ago
  I think it has to do with CS / computer engineering academic skills not carrying over too much to the software industry when compared to, say, how much a Chemistry or Chemical Engineering degree carries over to related industries. I have plenty of formal education, but to this day most of what I learnt after high school has been useless as a software engineer.
  - tonyarkles 6y ago
    I’m always surprised when I see people say things like this, based on my own experiences. In the last month or so, I’ve used: - linear algebra (transformation matrices and inverses primarily) - calculus - approximation methods to get “good enough/fast enough” solutions to the Chinese Postman Problem and the Traveling Salesman Problem - a self-derived plane sweep algorithm for doing something special with a ton of planar polygons The only conclusion that I’ve come up with so far is that it either varies dramatically by which industries you’re developing software for, or other organizations have people with specialized skill sets that work out the broad strike solutions to these types of problems before getting the software teams to build the production versions of them.
    - 6y ago
killingtime74 6y ago
Doesn’t surprise me this is Uber we’re talking about
boromi 6y ago
So which boot bootcamp did he start with?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
8589934591 6y ago
Great article. I wish BradfieldCS would offer some kind of discount for people from countries who don't have a USD salary. I make $600 a month before taxes and expenses. I can put aside $100-150 a month if I live slightly frugally and be strict with my savings. I don't see myself saving $1800 (12-18 months) to take up one course. Same goes for their new program - https://bradfieldcs.com/csi/ https://bradfieldcs.com/csi/ - $19500. Does the author or anyone have any other free/affordable alternatives for BradfieldCS? teachyourselfcs is the only one I can think of which I'm following currently.

114 points by richieartoul 6y ago

While I think its comical that the author casually recommends people to go "speak at conferences", theres some really good advice here. I came out of a Hack Reactor and started pumping out React code for a small startup. After about 6 months, I was bored and decided to take some Bradfield courses just like this article recommends and the experience has been invaluable. Seeing how some "black boxes" work in details has been super illuminating and helpful at times. The core concepts and even just the code I was exposed to moved the needle in terms of my progress quite a bit and also showed me other areas of software engineering I didn't know existed when I got started.

foolinaround 6y ago
First time I am hearing about Bradfield courses. What makes them better than the online MOOC courses at Stanford, MIT, etc?
- richieartoul 6y ago
  I'm biased because I've become great friends with the bradfield founders (Hi Myles and Oz!) since I took all their classes years ago, and recently guest lectured as part of their databases class, but they're basically targeted at working bootcamp graduates that have huge C.S holes in their knowledge. More of a practical focus than what I would imagine you get from online MOOC courses (plus live instruction), but to be honest I haven't taken a lot of MOOC's personally so I may not be the best to compare.
  - dwoot 6y ago
    Richie -- absolutely absolutely stunning and incredible! I thought I was making strides. I've taken two BradfieldCS courses and have had some personal mentoring from Myles even before Bradfield was born. If the original question asker is reading this thread, I can lend some more insight having done MOOCs and Bradfield. First off, Oz and Myles are behind teachyourselfcs.com, one exceptional and concise site which their curriculum is sort of based off of. Oz is also the author behind, "You Are Not Google" that was HUGELY popular on here a couple years back. The thing that Oz and Myles brought was their incredible enthusiasm coupled with their passion for mathematics and computer science. They were practitioners teaching at it from a practitioner's perspective with the goal of providing another practitioner the CS most applicable to their jobs. These courses were in-person in San Francisco for a while (but no longer). Look up either Myles or Oz on Twitter and you'll notice that they're very much still engaged in technical conversations and the computer science and how to teach it today. The one thing I always always took away from the teachyourselfcs.com site is the section under, "Why learn computer science?" > There are 2 types of software engineer: those who understand computer science well enough to do challenging, innovative work, and those who just get by because they’re familiar with a few high level tools. > Both call themselves software engineers, and both tend to earn similar salaries in their early careers. But Type 1 engineers progress toward more fulfilling and well-remunerated work over time, whether that’s valuable commercial work or breakthrough open-source projects, technical leadership or high-quality individual contributions. I have an inkling that Richie, right here, is EXACTLY what they were talking about when drafting this. This blog post exemplifies this. I've learned so much from the both of them, but I can honestly say, Richie, if you're reading this, this was a f*ckin' gem! Would love to grab coffee with you some time once the pandemic's over.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> While I think its comical that the author casually recommends people to go "speak at conferences" Why's that comical? If you have something interesting to say, go for it! Even if you don't, there's no harm in applying. Most people are way more interesting than they think they are.
- thomas_moon 6y ago
  TIL that you can apply to speak at conferences. I always thought it was an invite only kind of deal haha. Thanks!
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    For example use https://www.cfpland.com/conferences/ https://www.cfpland.com/conferences/ to get a list of CFPs (invitations to submit a talk.)
  - ambrood 6y ago
    I worked at Uber too. Turns out if you work at the right places, it opens doors for you. But yes most conferences have a "request for proposal" system.
  - mindcrime 6y ago
    Yep, the larger and more prestigious conferences may be harder to break into (as they have so many people submitting) but there are smaller conferences that are probably desperately hoping for more people to submit proposals. Or they were before COVID. I'm not sure how the transition to all (or mostly) virtual has affected the conference scene, but that's the way it was in the past. Based on my own experience, I'd say that you can always start out by speaking at local user groups or Meetups, build a resume of talks you've given, then apply to smaller / regional conferences, do a few of those, and ... well, that's where I stopped. All Things Open is the most prominent event I've presented at. But the point is, bootstrap and work your up the ladder. Look at the whole thing holistically too: blogging, putting content on Youtube, open source projects, etc, all go towards building your overall image and presence "out there".
  - 6y ago

maybenotafart 6y ago

I find it interesting how it nopes really complex icebergs

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ramzyo 6y ago

Well-written article and kudos to the author on their career success! One nitpick, the part about comparing possible startup comp in a unicorn exit and as a senior eng at Facebook over an 8 year period is missing the possible tax benefits of the startup comp. Facebook comp will be taxed as ordinary income as the stock is granted as RSUs (basically 40 - 50% in the US in the $500k/year bracket depending on the state you live in), whereas the majority of a $10 million windfall from being an early employee at a startup that exits after 8 years would likely result in at least half of the tax burden if you did it right and the options were ISOs. With a 4 year standard vesting schedule, the majority of options would have vested far before the startup was a unicorn, and the tax burden at time of option exercise may be very low. Assuming then a long term capital gains rate of 15% at time of sale, the comparison to Facebook comp over the same timeline is about 4x in favor of the startup rather than the 2x the article proposed. As the author says, though, the startup route is exceedingly risky and very highly likely not to come out ahead.

richieartoul 6y ago
This is a fair point, I didn’t even think to consider the different tax implications. Thanks for pointing this out!
- ramzyo 6y ago
  Don’t mention it! Nice article and again kudos to you on the career success.
wocram 6y ago
Then you would also need to include the potentially much worse outcome of paying taxes on the equity and having it later become worthless.
- ramzyo 6y ago
  Yes, the author captures this in their analysis as a risk variable.
sokoloff 6y ago

AriseAndPass 6y ago

I wish the author went into more detail about how to come up with "high leverage side projects" that help cultivate the type of fundamental CS knowledge he emphasises. Most of the suggestions I see for potential side projects are for some kind of consumer-facing (web/mobile/desktop) app - probably because most people in this context are prioritising the potential of generating side income, but this sounds more like what the author calls "plumbing" style backend/API work rather than something that would develop fundamental CS skills. So, any ideas? I've seen https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x https://github.com/danistefanovic/build-your-own-x which is a great collection of ideas all based on piercing an abstraction by building your own version of lower-level tools. Are there any other categories of side project that someone who wants to move technically deeper than a full-stack web app would do well to consider?

richieartoul 6y ago
(Author here) Nand2tetris is pretty awesome if you don’t already have strong CS fundamentals and feel like you “know how computers work”. If you had a good C.S education though you may not get much out of it. Here is a cool one I worked on awhile ago when I wanted to learn more about foundationDB: https://github.com/richardartoul/tsdb-layer https://github.com/richardartoul/tsdb-layer A long time ago I wanted to learn about regular expression engines so I wrote a tiny one: https://github.com/richardartoul/regex-engine https://github.com/richardartoul/regex-engine I built this with some friends a few years ago: https://hyperdash.io/ https://hyperdash.io/ (building the backend for this was a good learning experience and I learned a lot about writing multi threaded software making the python SDK). Those are just some examples to give you an idea, but to be honest it’s hard to give a good answer because side projects are deeply personal. It takes serious discipline and motivation to spend your nights and weekends writing code when that’s how you spend your working hours as well, so it’s really gonna be about what motivates you and will keep you engaged while also gaining “high leverage” skills (anything fundamental in the realm of networking, compilers, databases, data structures, etc. basically anything that’s not just another language or framework)
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago

amw-zero 6y ago

Can someone explain the trend of fetishizing the “bootcamp fairytale” whereby someone doesn’t have a CS background but ends up as a working programmer after going to a bootcamp? Let me explain. I didn’t study CS in college, but I did stud CE, a relatively related field. When I started working as a programmer, I immediately felt that there were some fundamentals I was missing, so I’ve spent a lot of time reading in my spare time to fill in some of those gaps. There seems to be a trend where someone switches careers, and glorifies the fact that they don’t have a CS background. Why dismiss the history of the field that you’re in? Not everyone has a PhD in CS, but there has been some incredibly important work done in the field, work that we all stand on the shoulders of. Is this an ego thing? It’s hard to be humble and admit that you have a lot of things to learn, so instead you resent the field and blame it for being arrogant?

mkl95 6y ago
I think it has to do with CS / computer engineering academic skills not carrying over too much to the software industry when compared to, say, how much a Chemistry or Chemical Engineering degree carries over to related industries. I have plenty of formal education, but to this day most of what I learnt after high school has been useless as a software engineer.
- tonyarkles 6y ago
  I’m always surprised when I see people say things like this, based on my own experiences. In the last month or so, I’ve used: - linear algebra (transformation matrices and inverses primarily) - calculus - approximation methods to get “good enough/fast enough” solutions to the Chinese Postman Problem and the Traveling Salesman Problem - a self-derived plane sweep algorithm for doing something special with a ton of planar polygons The only conclusion that I’ve come up with so far is that it either varies dramatically by which industries you’re developing software for, or other organizations have people with specialized skill sets that work out the broad strike solutions to these types of problems before getting the software teams to build the production versions of them.
  - 6y ago

killingtime74 6y ago

Doesn’t surprise me this is Uber we’re talking about

boromi 6y ago

So which boot bootcamp did he start with?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

8589934591 6y ago

Great article. I wish BradfieldCS would offer some kind of discount for people from countries who don't have a USD salary. I make $600 a month before taxes and expenses. I can put aside $100-150 a month if I live slightly frugally and be strict with my savings. I don't see myself saving $1800 (12-18 months) to take up one course. Same goes for their new program - https://bradfieldcs.com/csi/ https://bradfieldcs.com/csi/ - $19500. Does the author or anyone have any other free/affordable alternatives for BradfieldCS? teachyourselfcs is the only one I can think of which I'm following currently.