My journey to SDE from a non-CSE background: magic of RDS
Hello all! This blog is going to be about my journey into tech, full stack development in specific. Let’s get started 🔥
Introduction
I’m currently working as Frontend Engineer at smallcase and pursuing final year of Instrumentation Engineering from VIT Pune (yes, a full time job while being in college 😛). I’m also a member of Real Dev Squad, a developers community where people are constantly learning new things, upskilling themselves and helping each other.
When and how did it start
It was March 2020 and whole of the India was under a lockdown due to Covid. All students were back to their homes. It was around May when the results of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) were out and I had seen a few folks from my college getting selected that year and previous years as well. It all felt very glamorous to me, to be honest. The LinkedIn posts, the fame, the association of your name with some programme conducted by Google, the stipend and everything else. That’s when I felt I should give it a shot.
As already mentioned in the introduction, I do not come from a CSE background and I did not have any senior friends as such to guide me back then. I was confused with where to start from, web development, mobile development, ML, cyber security and the list goes on. I started researching on YouTube and found out videos by Akshay Saini and Tanay Pratap on how web development is a good option. As any other normal kid, I started watching YouTube tutorials on HTML, CSS, JavaScript.
The messy part
Hype for React was real. I had just started with JS (JavaScript) and I quickly wanted to move to learning React, so I can make projects, have some experience, get into GSoC/internship at some company. I did not know what are the important parts of JavaScript, I tried asking people on Linkedin “what all things in JS which I could learn, before moving to React” and I did NOT get any proper responses, “learn all the basic things” were the replies, which did not help me much. So I was on my own again. There was a playlist that I was following on YouTube for learning JavaScript. It had pretty long videos on DOM Manipulation and that was the moment, “This is too long, I’m not doing this, I’m moving to React”. My worst mistake till date 😛
I jumped to React. I was following the YouTube videos, I was getting some confidence that I know something. Soon enough, I started getting errors and they scared the hell out of me. I could not understand the errors, because I had skipped some important parts of JS. I tried reading on stackoverflow, but I couldn’t understand the solutions too since I was unaware of the keywords there. I made up my mind, “React isn’t for me”.
I then moved to watching tutorials on NodeJS/ExpressJS. I was able to follow the tutorials this time, was enjoying it. I was gaining some confidence again. This time around, I started looking for internships in NodeJS. I found one opening on some Telegram group and I applied there. Got a call from HR, they said this will be an unpaid internship and I denied. I continued making projects in backend using Node, Express and Mongo.
Found an amazing developers community
I was scrolling through LinkedIn and I found a post by Ankush Dharkar, where he had mentioned something about a community that he was running — Real Dev Squad, aka RDS. I wanted to give it a try. I DMed him and I was in the discord server.
I had got some beginner friendly issues to work on. They were mostly around adding/improving README or CONTRIBUTING docs. I was just learning git at that time. 7 out of my first 10 PRs (Pull Requests) were about documentation only 😛. Then I moved into backend. The first issue that was given to me was adding Swagger docs in the codebase and I literally had no idea what is Swagger and how do you integrate it. I had tried reading up, but couldn’t understand. I gave up, someone else did that task. Then I was working on APIs, that was doable for me since I had an idea about it from the YouTube tutorials. I was getting a hang of the things going on.
Then I was told to write some integration tests and I still remember having almost an hour long call with Ankur Narkhede (owner of RDS backend) where he was explaining us what are integration tests, how do they work, how are they written. It was an amazing call, learnt a lot. I then wrote some integration tests as well.
I was in backend for like 2–3 months and then one of the members — Sumit, he started asking me to pick up tasks in React. Man, how could I explain him the hate relationship that I had developed with React 😂. I was avoiding him for some time and then he finally got me assigned to a React task. Now I was forced to overcome my fear. This time around, I wasn’t going for the YouTube tutorials, I went for the official docs directly. I was able to understand things now. I was able to complete the task that was given to me. Yes, I did need some calls to discuss my blockers.
Getting comfortable with frontend tech
Now my fear was going away. I was able to understand how to work with React. At this time, I also had to make a project for my college as a part of the semester. I created a full stack project with React, Express and Firestore. I also had brought my own domain and hosted it there. I was super happy that I was able to create a project just by myself.
Soon enough, we had a project in RDS which was supposed to be written in Ember. I was asked if I could lead it. I literally had not heard of Ember before, but still I did not want to lose an opportunity. I said yes. Other people were working on initial tasks and I was chilling 😂, not for long though. I was also given a task in Ember and I was forced to learn Ember as well. I took quite a long time to complete this task as I was quite reluctant to learn Ember. With some follow ups and motivational talks by Ankush, I did this task as well.
Interview phase
It was around March, 3–4 of my good friends had got internships by then in companies like NVIDIA, Deutsche Bank and I experienced what is called as “FOMO or Fear Of Missing Out”. I started applying to companies on LinkedIn, AngelList but did not hear back from most. Then I told my RDS friends that I’m looking for internship, will it be possible for them to refer me in their current/former companies. I got referred at Testbook and FamPay from RDS folks.
Started sending mails to companies as well. Had sent mails to Groww and smallcase, and I had heard back from smallcase. So I interviewed at Testbook, FamPay and smallcase. Fortunately, got selected in all the three companies. Decided to join smallcase for 6 month internship for July-December 2021. Here is my interview experience in case you’re interested.
smallcase happens to be the first company I’m working with. I was able to clear the interviews because of the learning-by-doing nature of RDS tasks and the technical discussions that we used to have. It was an amazing journey (it still is). If I can do it, you can do it too!
After my internship got over in December 2021, I was offered full time job from January 2022 itself and I’ll be graduating in May/June 2022. I am doing a job while I’m in college, which is so cool! I can afford to pay for my things, my travels and everything else 🔥
Coming from a middle class family and being able to pay my things + contribute in family expenses is a great feeling for me and my parents. All credits to RDS and the fellow members that we have here. Guidance is really important for anyone who’s starting out in their career and this is where RDS members come into picture. It’s a pretty awesome community of very talented, humble and helpful developers 💯
Special thanks to: Ankush, Akanksha, Ankur, Harshith, Nikhil, Pranav, Prakash, Rucha, Shashwat, Sumit. Couldn’t have been possible without your guidance and support!
