Erics journey to Development and programming

Hello! It has been quite sometime since I have posted on my blog, and to whoever reads these I do apologize for the delay of my story and what I have been up to for the past couple of months/year. So to fill people in on what I have been up to, I have met the most amazing woman that has been with me through thick and thin, and has been the been the biggest inspiration of my life including my dog. I feel the luckiest man in the universe to have her as my wife and couldn't as for more, as she has made me into the man that I am today. Along side of my family, I have been non-stop coding and have recently been acquired by a company called Nexient. I know that my blog has been quite the journey of traveling back and fourth of finding the right path for me and what I want to accomplish in the tech field. Although this blog has been meant for me acquiring a comfortable position, I have now realized that the title of the dream job shouldn't have been what I was aiming. Although having ...

8/14/18     Its the 2nd day of the Lambda Next program and so far so good with starting a more structured job search. Hopefully with the continuation of this program, it will help students have a more structured job search and also entering the field as either an experienced developer or someone thats just getting into the field.   With me already completing the first week project which was to create a portfolio to display some of the projects we have worked on throughout the time of Lambda school, I get to move on to the next project which is to make a contribution to a capstone project of a previous cohort that has already graduated. I decided to make contributions towards the hairspray project from CS7, which needed a bit tweaking here and there.   First thing I noticed when I first launched the project was that there was an error standing that the variable for one of the packages was not being defined. I tried to find out what the problem was until I came ...

8/13/18     Its been about 3 weeks now since I've last posted, and so far things have been piling up for me to do to become ready for truly what is my goal in sight. My brother has passed, and now it is time for me to continue on his legacy; linkedin or even at a different company!. For now the most important part I need to take care of is getting where I need to go in order to finish what I started about a year ago.   So far in Lambda School of the necessary skills that I have gained from the program is utilizing my fast learning abilities and apply it to learn new technologies and code base's. Lambda School has been nothing but a great experience, getting my feet wet with under the hood computer science theory and professional web development  practices. They've taught me to break down complex problems and solve them piece by piece in order to construct a well made, professional, and on-time product. Along with special Javascript tooling such as ES6+, redux fa...

July 9th 2018,     We all have role models in our lives, people that inspire; to do better. On July 8th, my older brother passed away. It is a difficult time for my family and I as we move on in our daily lives. As of right now I am riding a train back to San Diego, to visit my family. The pain in my chest, the condolences texts that have been going on; it hurts, and I'm not sure I know how to fight this pain back.    My sister and I don't know how we can face our Mother and our sister in law as they are truly devastated. For now the best thing we can do is fight through this pain and continue to keep our heads high as that is what my brother would want for all of us.   Jason Blancas, was an interesting older brother growing up. During his younger days he would get into trouble a lot, but at such a young age he was continuing to have fun through his youth. The moment I saw him mature in his human nature, was at the point of age 24/25, which is the same age as I ...

June 23rd, 2018     I know I haven't been posting a lot on my personal life and what's going, but I will now start to make a comeback on what I have started. A lot has been going on since I last posted 2 months ago. It shocks me on how much can change in just a matter of a month!, but so much has been going on in my life both personal and also Software development.    There were a couple of things happening so far personal wise such meeting the girl who is making an impact on my life, discussing the future with my parents and also mental health concerns going on in my quarter life crises. All of these things are pushing me to become the person who I am destined to be and what is to come for in the future. For now as long as I am holding on, and having faith with the people who care for me and are around me, I think I'll be ok.   My career options and also future is the reason why my fellow lambdas read this. I have been focusing a lot on my software develop...

April 24, 2018      So far the search has been difficult for the past couple of weeks. I have had a couple of lucks in getting interviews but the interviews were a bit challenging as usual, not only that but the fact that I was only applying to New York positions, it made it more difficult because I am not local to the area.    I spoke with my career advisor in switching up my strategy of finding a job and she concurred that applying to local positions would make it seem easier because of the lesser resources in order to interview potential candidates. So for now I am just applying to local front end developer positions out here in the west, to make it easier on me.    In the mean time while I'm waiting for my applications to process through, I did a huge amount of side projects to fill in the time on my coding journey. My portfolio is fully polished, my github looks pretty active justifying from the charts, and also I am learning some new techno...

Feb 20th, 2018     Its been only a couple of days since leaving lambda school and I have been coding like a madman. It seems as lambda created a way for me to enjoy coding even more because of what they have taught through the 6 months. I have been through the tough times of trying to complete the program and fighting hard through depression, and I have finally completed the program. Now the real party begins, nows the time to search for the position that I always wanted. I was also offered a spot on the TA team to help students learn the computer science curriculum, but since my intentions are to find my findings out in New York, I decided to decline and just shoot for the stars. Now my goals and mind are very clear about what I want to do in the future.     I have also been attending this developer conference out in San Francisco, its called Ibm index. A lot of programmers from the world attend this event and was very excited to get the invite for o...

   February 15th, 2018      Tomorrow will mark the day I graduate from Lambda School. Its been a journey of the past 6 months but I am here to finally say that I have finally completed something. They years I have been going were a rough patch in my life and I am hoping for the better as the years go by. I am more than proud to say that I am a graduate of cs2, that first started off with more than 50 people, and I am one of the final 7 people that made it.    It wasn't easy to get where I am now, and there were times where I wanted to just give up, but I just kept going. I never gave up even when the tough kept going; I never gave up because I knew exactly what I wanted. Currently now because of some recent events, theres more fire in my eyes than there ever was before. Not only am I fighting for my goals of becoming a software engineer, but to also fight for a change in my life; for a fresh start and for something new. Which is why I decided to ai...

February 10, 2018    Its been a decent amount of time since my last blog. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been very dedicated and thriving to improve my craft day by day and so far the hard work has paid off. Starting off Lambda School, I barely knew a thing about Data Structures, algorithms and CS in general. The amount of reading and time I have put in to understanding the content and also putting it into practice during practice of interviews, has gotten me to a very far point as of now. Its amazing of how much I can accomplish just by putting in months of work.   To recap of what is going on in Lambda School, I will be graduating in about 1 more week!. The time has come for me to end the program, but the journey is not finished yet. With some much that I've learned, the journey of becoming a better programmer can always take a long time, even years!. The most important that I've learned about this field is that the tech industry grows exponentially as time passes ...

Dec 12th, 2017      About a year ago I started this blog to track my progress, and looking back at how far I've come, its has been quite the journey for me from Dec 2016 - Dec 2017. 1 year has just past by and everything has just happened so quickly!. It feels like just yesterday I got accepted into Lambda School, at that moment I started seeing stars. The feeling that I finally found the school for me was extraordinary and exhilarating, I was so eager to start working and learn about the thing I love the most, software!.    Around the moment of August and the day I was first accepted I was already working on the pre-course work. My parents were disappointed that I had dropped out of college and disagreed with my thoughts that the traditional system is starting to become outdated, and my thoughts on traditional system have not changed since then. The moment I got kicked out of college I had just discovered what I wanted to study all along and that was compu...

Nov 7th, 2017       Couple of days after my big day at the Google dev festival, I come back strong with a slight experience of talking to other professional developers and getting to know the field more. When the day started for us, we just finished our intro to the CS course of lambda school. I was very familiar with he architecture so nothing was really new to me except for the protocols being explained a little more thorough. We finished the lectures of the intro to CS and the architecture, now it was time to move onto C programming, and boy oh boy were we in for a wild ride.   The moment we jumped into C programming, we all looked pretty puzzled throughout and it wasnt getting any easier for us. This is probably the hardest thing  I've done here yet and C programming is not a forgiving language to grasp. The objective wasn't just to learn C but the abilities to grasp another language quickly like we were javascript. This is a very difficult task for C prog...

Nov 4th, 2017    10AM:        We first started off the day with a keynote speaker talking about being a developer for 21 years. Seeing him in his shoes and learning to adapt to different technologies developing over the years, must be pretty hard to get used to, he explained that the process can get difficult to get used to but with a bit of trusting the process, he got used to it. As of now I am prepping up for my first code lab learning about the Ionic framework, which is the equivalent to react native for angular. I was able to meet with two very well experienced developers and it is surprised to my knowledge that there are different types of platforms that developers stand on for development. There was one developer I have met and he told me that he developed on .Net, which is really interesting. Also  met another presenter who is a developer for kotlin, who came all the way from France!. So as of now, it is a great start and I'll keep an up t...

Oct 31, 2017: Halloween    It's Halloween today, and today, I'm just planning to code the entire day completely. The whole holiday spirit of halloween, going to parties and trick or treating is currently not in my cycle anymore, although it is still fun to dress up as a character. So far we have completed the break week of lambda school for cohort 2, and this time around we will be starting the CS course of the school.   We just got a taste of it just yesterday and some of the things looked a lot familiar to me just because of the fact that I have built multiple gaming pcs in the past. Even when I was little, my older brother and I would make a computer from scratch. It was really fun to start learning of the architecture of the computer and it is compromised of. We started off learning about transistors and logic gates which was really fascinating. As for the project for this sprint, we are required to write a core of a cpu to support the following instructions. #inputf...

Oct, 26th 2017      So just recently we got released to work on our personal projects for the cohort. I have been working constantly and thinking hard on what I wanted to do for my personal project. I remember stating that I wanted to do 5 projects, well the number of things that I wanted to accomplish in order to have a good portfolio was impossible so, I decided to just make 2 projects instead of 5 being a hard number to reach in the amount of time that we had. I decided to make a taxi booking application for my react-native side of things and a website for finding marvel comic books with the marvel api.    I have gotten so much done in the shortest amount of time for the project and it is turning out really well. I used a good amount of packages and dependencies to make the projects work in the ways that I would want it to. I learned also on how to implement redux into react-native as well, instead of the typical ways of returning the actions in the action cr...

Oct 18th, 2017      Here we are, top of the mountain final stretch. We just got done with our devops, despite the fact of me not liking devops at all, we have finally reached the top of hill and about to embark our journey way done. So one of the things we are required to do next is called a personal project, the project doesn't have to have everything that we have learned up to the point, but we are required to make it a fullstack project. There's a list of projects thats flowing through my head by one of the top projects that I have always wanted to make, that includes making a project using the ibm watson api or something with the marvel api. Whatever it is that I'm going to make, I'm going to try to make the accomplishment of making 5 personal projects.   It seemed as if there was a lot going on with the instructors and the relationship of cs2. My cohort can be very intimidating as most of us are pretty skilled at this. So I"m going to have to do my best thes...

Oct 16th, 2017     For the past couple of months, I've been dealing with so much with lambda school. To making new friends, to accomplishing coding challenges, to having social interaction with instructors, and to dealing with depression/working under stress. Towards the beginning, this school is starting to change my life and these were the points that I wanted to make as a college dropout. I wanted to show those who have doubted me that you can make it without the worth of an expensive piece of paper. It shouldn't and should NOT let it define you, as I pin pointed out from my last blogs, my objective is similar to lambdas and thats to prove that a an underprivileged like myself can make it . Oct 16th 2017, Update:     Just got off the phone with tai one of our instructors for lambda school. Earlier, I decided to ask him a serious question and this was it, "Out of all the things you've been through, especially going through lambda school, would you do it again? and ...

Oct 9th, 2017    With so much that is going on, I notice a lot of things since the start of the program. My skills as a programmer are improving everyday, and its remarkable how much I have improved within just 3 months. The best part is, we're not even finished yet. By the time I write this post we would've reached the react native course which is close to being done with the full-stack javascript section of the school, afterwards we have our introduction to C/C++ programming which is majority of the time employers want. Reasons as to why they would want this so much is because of the fact that you have a good/basic understanding of what goes on under the hood.   So theres a couple of things that I noticed right when I first started the program, first thing was my ability now to tackle coding challenge problems, at the start being able to start a coding challenge problem was difficult for me, but after repetitive reps and constant thinking; my skills for solving these...

October 2nd, 2017     For some of the new students that are about to embark on a course that is brutally difficult and hard to keep up with, realize this. For some of us, we may think that pretty much our skills are up to par with the professional industry due to the self-learning route and that we would have a breeze not only in the course but also in the environment. Sadly that is not the case, in order to become a good programmer and developer you must first admit to the fact that you do not know everything, and that there is much to be worked on; not only that but the willingness to learn. With the all the technology that is surrounding us, it is always improving every single day of our lives. We must admit that technology and also computer science can go so into depth, it is impossible to know everything that there is in computer science because there is no skill cap.   These are some of my weaknesses that I will go over, and continue to study upon during the we...

   Sept 28th, 2017       We are getting ready to close our 2nd month and just about to move into our 3rd month of the course. For the new students that are reading this blog, keep in mind that this course is brutally, excruciatingly difficult. If you know for a fact that this is what you want to do and willing to sacrifice a lot of free time, then apply. At the start of the program, I was in a desperate state, I couldn't afford the move to san francisco so makeschool was definitely out of the question. At the time my only move was to attend coding dojo and pull out a 10k loan which was highly risky for my age. Being 23 in the adult world isn't as easy as it looks, people tend to not take you seriously majority of the time, unless you are highly skilled and a hard negotiator, which I am not. Then came Lambda School, I came across the ad on facebook, and I was fascinated by the high amounts of praise for their instructors. I took a look at their website, and then...

Hello,     First and for most, I want to thank those for reading my blog. It definitely means a lot to me that you willing to know more about the school that is making such an impact on my life and the process of becoming a developer. We just started our 2nd week of mongodb and what I've noticed is that the process of making an api is getting harder and harder. We learned that promises over callbacks tend to have a cleaner look rather than callbacks, because it makes them easier to read. Also with the more complex web apps that is being built the harder the back end is going to be. This stuff is not easy, but boy oh boy, stuff like this is making me love cs even more. I'm definitely going to have to practice more backend stuff, because programming stuff like this makes me feel even more like a programmer.   As for the project goes so far we have our first full stack project coming up real soon, so my mind is having mixed thoughts on what I want to do as a project, because...