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I understand this conundrum - I experienced homelessness myself. I had a top notch education, attended a top program in mathematics for graduate school as a Ph

by Bahamut 13y ago

I understand this conundrum - I experienced homelessness myself. I had a top notch education, attended a top program in mathematics for graduate school as a PhD student, ABD (All But Dissertation)...and ended up homeless after leaving graduate school. I did not prepare for the real world at all - I naively expected the real world to recognize a talent like mine and seize it. I quickly learned that was not the case. I joined the military out of desperation over that reality. It was a hard way to live, but it had its rewards. It wasn't the life I wanted to live though, and so, after completing initial active duty training, I was out on the job search again. I applied to just about any white collar job I could, touting my education, excellent intelligence, and ability to learn quickly. Still no luck. I got fed up and started to teach myself coding. I started to enjoy it greatly. A little more than a year after leaving active orders, I found an entry level job at a non-profit - a dream position for me at the time, minus the pay, but it was pay that I couldn't even touch in salary before. My pay made me more hungry to succeed, so I spent many offhours & downtime during work to learn as much as I could about web development. I switched jobs only 10 months into that first career job in web development and became a senior frontend developer. It has been not even a year since I started my career & I'm on track to be a successful professional. From 3 1/2 years ago to 1 year ago, I was essentially homeless. I used whatever means possible to survive, and kept as sane as I could throughout all that time. Homelessness was a humbling experience. It was painful, but it was illuminating. I made bad decisions, as well as my parents, but the situation got me to reflect and put myself back on the right path, with some help from friends. I am still the same person as I ever was, but my compassion for others with legitimate troubles has grown. I still help anyone I can & who is willing to set their lives on the right path, as others helped me beforehand.

FLUX-YOU 13y ago
What technologies and projects did you have when you got the initial position at the non-profit? I've spent about a year doing the same, but I still feel unprepared with only some small, unfinished projects in my repository. There always seems to be some additional technology I need to learn before being job ready. Thanks for the read.
- Bahamut 13y ago
  I built webpages and figured out CSS well enough where I understood how to use it to do most standard things. I learned how to use jQuery to do custom behavior such as setting width on certain elements depending on the browser window size (which I now know I should have been doing via CSS), animating, etc. I figured out how to use LESS functionally, if not structure my HTML & CSS well enough to take huge advantage of it. I built a basic homepage in Ruby on Rails using Twitter Bootstrap with SASS, without really understanding SASS that well except that it looked similar to LESS. I knew nothing about best practices - nobody taught me anything like that before getting that first position. I hackishly created stuff, including a WordPress plugin that pulls Twitter JSON tweet data for a particular user & displayed it at the end of each post (without knowing about PHP's JSON decoding helper method) - this was for an interview that I did in about 1 day (but I did not get called back, probably because I did such horrible things such as manually parse the JSON into the strings I wanted). For me, I happened into a good match since the non-profit needed someone to do frontend and learn some stuff like a client-side MVC framework & Node.js. I was desperate for any career-track job & zoomed in on web development, and the non-profit needed someone they could get as cheaply as possible, yet allow the person to grow while in the job. I think they got a lot more than they expected in me - I have far exceeded expectations at both of my jobs so far.
011011100 13y ago
Hey, you have an interesting story. I was wondering if we could chat in private? ta011011100@gmail

by Bahamut 13y ago

FLUX-YOU 13y ago

What technologies and projects did you have when you got the initial position at the non-profit? I've spent about a year doing the same, but I still feel unprepared with only some small, unfinished projects in my repository. There always seems to be some additional technology I need to learn before being job ready. Thanks for the read.

Bahamut 13y ago
I built webpages and figured out CSS well enough where I understood how to use it to do most standard things. I learned how to use jQuery to do custom behavior such as setting width on certain elements depending on the browser window size (which I now know I should have been doing via CSS), animating, etc. I figured out how to use LESS functionally, if not structure my HTML & CSS well enough to take huge advantage of it. I built a basic homepage in Ruby on Rails using Twitter Bootstrap with SASS, without really understanding SASS that well except that it looked similar to LESS. I knew nothing about best practices - nobody taught me anything like that before getting that first position. I hackishly created stuff, including a WordPress plugin that pulls Twitter JSON tweet data for a particular user & displayed it at the end of each post (without knowing about PHP's JSON decoding helper method) - this was for an interview that I did in about 1 day (but I did not get called back, probably because I did such horrible things such as manually parse the JSON into the strings I wanted). For me, I happened into a good match since the non-profit needed someone to do frontend and learn some stuff like a client-side MVC framework & Node.js. I was desperate for any career-track job & zoomed in on web development, and the non-profit needed someone they could get as cheaply as possible, yet allow the person to grow while in the job. I think they got a lot more than they expected in me - I have far exceeded expectations at both of my jobs so far.

011011100 13y ago

Hey, you have an interesting story. I was wondering if we could chat in private? ta011011100@gmail