06/20/2015 - 01/09/2017 I think it’s time for me to talk about my path to the world of java. I'll start from afar. Warning, this post will be long. I am 25 years old. I live in St. Petersburg. I came to this city to study from the provinces. Studied to become a business analyst. Studying itself did not bring me pleasure. I didn’t understand what I would do, I didn’t see any practical benefit in the subjects I was studying. And what can I say, I just suffered from crap, like most students. From session to session, I led a carefree lifestyle, and all my studies consisted of paying off the educational debts I had acquired. After finishing my bachelor’s degree, it dawned on me that I had nowhere to work, nothing to rent an apartment for, and something inside me didn’t allow me to go back home without achieving anything. So a master's degree seemed like a reasonable option to me. She gave me time to live in a dorm while I looked for a job. I found a job. I got a job in a company that implemented ERP systems 1C and Microsoft Navision. Got a job as a consultant. This is the guy who is the intermediate link between the client and the developer. However, management decided to convert me to a programmer because I knew Pascal. So they decided. Became a junior developer at Microsoft Navision. Development language - C/AL. This is practically the same pascal, customized for the Navision system. Those. You can’t write anything on it except all sorts of crap for this system. At first I liked working. However, I soon realized that as a programmer, I felt very cramped and somehow uncomfortable in this environment. But studying for a master’s degree did not allow me to study anything else, and what’s more, I was too lazy for something else. Having gotten everything I wanted from the master's program (time to live in a dorm and a job), I was somehow done with it. The path to the world of java began then. When I freed myself from the shackles of university and decided to learn some OOP language. I began to choose. C++ is too complicated - they wrote on the forums, C# - I don’t remember what they wrote about it, Java is in demand, not as complicated as C++, there is a lot of literature, including Russian. Well, java is java (it’s worth saying that at university I took one semester of Java. Somehow I got a pass and decided that I would never connect my life with this language). Once the language was chosen, it was impossible not to find javarush. Joined this resource on June 20, 2015. Started studying. I don't know how to describe my training here. I was not an outstanding student. I didn't exercise as regularly as I would have liked. I didn't always solve problems myself. I didn’t always understand why I was assigned another task. I didn't always read all the extras. materials for lectures. I often got angry when the validator tested my nerves. I had long breaks in my studies (more than a month), sometimes due to work stress, sometimes due to laziness, which I could not always overcome. However, I wouldn't have found a job if learning java hadn't changed something inside me. For the first time in my life, I was determined to see this matter through to completion. Inside I was telling myself that no matter what, I will not give up this business. This was the first goal in my life, the achievement of which required great effort from me. And for the first time in my life I told myself that I don’t care about everything, I will achieve it. I don't know if I could do the same if javarush didn't exist. This resource allows you to see the path to your goal. It’s as if he’s telling you: “Here it is, this path, 40 levels and work.” This helps a lot in not quitting. I bought myself an unlimited subscription. Knowledge of Pascal was very helpful in solving problems. And I really enjoyed solving them. Sitting in IDEA, feeling like a cool developer with a cool environment. I completed 20 levels and decided it was time for interviews. Of course, I hoped to get an offer, but I wanted more to get to an interview in order to evaluate the knowledge I had acquired, and to get a kick and motivation for further development. That's exactly what happened. Of course, I didn’t pass the interview, but to my great surprise, everything turned out to be not as bad as I had feared. However, I received a kick and a dose of motivation. I realized the importance of theory, and from level 21 I began to actively read supplementary information. literature. Well, how actively, from level 21, interview questions on the topic of the level began to appear. I decided that if I answer them, it will be enough, because... I'm terribly lazy. So from level 21 I becamepost answers to questions on level topics. People started commenting on my answers. There was this comment: “Thank you very much for the topic. Continue blogging - it’s like a fulcrum for me: I see your answer and open books, Google, trying to find what’s missing.” This surprised me very much. I wrote only for myself, but it turned out that it was also useful for someone. This gave me additional motivation. I already felt an obligation to answer all questions and post my answers. However, time passed, and I developed only within the framework of the Java core. I only learned what javarush gave me. And in the labor market there were such scary words as maven, gradle, jdbc, tomcat, hibernate, spring, etc. And I was like in a joke: “I know kung fu, karate, taekwondo and a lot of other scary words.” So I decided it was time to expand my horizons. I started googling, looking for tutorials on various topics, started with jdbc and it went from there. Once upon a time I was wildly infuriated that I couldn’t find a normal weather widget for Android, even then I thought that I would write it myself. This prompted me to study android. There is a cool resource on Android called startandroid, where from a large number of ugly simple lessons you can put together something not so simple. I never wrote a weather widget, but I did write a calculator, no matter how trivial it may be. During the development of the calculator, I studied the basics of regular expressions and the reverse Polish notation algorithm. I liked this business. But the Java job market was dominated by vacancies related to Java EE. Therefore, I rushed between Javarash, java ee and android. I wrote a small web application, one logical toy on Android. I once wrote a sea battle. I decided to rewrite it too, because... I have more or less mastered OOP. You can say that I wrote it from scratch, because... there was such slag there that I could not understand how I made THIS work, and how THIS works in general. I started looking for vacancies again. He responded to everything. But no one called me. Three whole months. I couldn't understand why. I was looking for information on how to get a job as a junior. And everywhere they wrote about how to behave during interviews. This is certainly useful information, but how do you even get there?! It was truly a test of strength. On some forum, a person complained that he was already studying so much, but they still wouldn’t hire him. Someone answered him: "That's Java. The barrier to entry is too high." These words instilled some pride in me. Yes, I felt proud that the barrier to entry was really high, and I still wouldn’t quit. I told myself that my business was small, just continue to study, no matter what happened. This is probably the most difficult thing. Just keep practicing. From day to day. With my post I want to give everyone one piece of advice. Get busy. Believe in yourself and in your dream. Don't let anyone, and especially yourself, undermine your determination. You have to not just believe that everything will work out. You must be confident that this will happen, because you will not give up, and you will hit one point until you reach your goal. Why they didn’t invite me anywhere, I still don’t understand. But after 3 months I was invited to 4 interviews. I applied to three vacancies. And one company invited me itself. It was Yandex. I still didn’t understand why they called me. Although, this would be a cool ending to my post. But I never got through to Yandex. The interviews were mostly based on theory. My personal projects listed above helped me a lot, which allowed me to change the topic of conversation from theory to practice. So this is also kind of a tip, it might help you. Out of 4 interviews, Yandex rejected me. The other company turned out to be a sharashka office. The third and fourth promised to call back. The fourth one called back and congratulated me on successfully passing the first stage of the interview. A test task was sent. I will not describe it in detail. But in short, it was necessary to write a web application through which I needed to interact with the mobile application interface through a third-party program running locally on the computer. Those. the web application sent commands to a third-party application, the third-party application sent a command to the phone via wifi, and all this was reflected in the web interface. When I received the test task, I did not know the lion's share of the technologies that needed to be used. I had a week. It was a coding marathon. I've never had such intense coding. For a week, nothing existed in the world except me and this project. Finished it and sent it. They called me back and offered me a job. They said that they liked everything so much that they decided in favor of me, before you have received decisions from other candidates. Since January 9 of this year, I have been working as a mobile application testing automation specialist. I am very pleased with my work now. There are a lot of goodies, including free food all day, a schedule starting at 12, a hammock in the office and corporate English. In other words, get busy. You do it because you believe it's worth it. And it's really worth it.
GO TO FULL VERSION