I’ve been meaning to do this for a while!

TLTR A big thank you to TOP and it’s volunteers that helped me get a junior developer job

As the title shows I have found a job and I want from the bottom of my heart to thank The Odin Project for it!

Background

I am a CS graduate with an MSc degree but I lacked learning and practising coding in my curriculum as I found it boring and hard! I mainly focused in data analytics stuff but didn’t deeply understood what I was doing/what was going on under the hood…

Little did I know that 90% of the jobs out there are strictly for coding…

The beginning

Sooooo after an epic beginning here , I learnt a lot about VCS (git) and mainly CSS,html and JS.

I am currently finishi ng my web 101 course but the help I got was really big!

So time went on and on and I started learning a lot of GitHub, felt comfortable with Unix , terminal commands etc…

Ιn addition, via JS and a bit of Ruby projects I have also learned basic algorithms and coding More specifically, I got to develop 4-5 basic pages with JS functionality as well as think about basic algorithms like pig Latin and palindromes.

Let’s Start

It all started after 3 months playing ( full time) with TOP where there was an opening for a Java Spring (MVC framework) bootcamp.

I decided to apply, went through the tests and the technical interview was a breeze. Most of the stuff they asked were my life the previous months doing TOP…

The bootcamp was over I learned a bit of Java too + exercised a bit more my JS skills as i focused on front end (bootstrap that I’ve seen from my TOP projects etc) and I was out to the market!

Time to apply!

I never really applied as I mostly got offers via partners of my bootcamp but nevertheless the CV-Resume I did was once again based to the beloved TOP suggestions.

2 interviews later I got my first offer which was pretty low so even thought I really struggled mentally I declined.

Time went on and I have reached 13 interviews…

We’ve found a match

1st interview they inform me 1-2 days before I would have a multiple choice test in Java, C(I knew a bit from high school) and SQl!

Oh my god I told myself I am doomed!

Nevertheless I kept searching and believing TOP and quickly played around the first 2 sections of SQL course…

I went to the test and I was genuinely impressed regarding what I could do as TOP (+GitHub/copy pasting overflow) had taught me how to read through a code and intuitively know what to change/do and except!

2nd interview after a bit talking a whiteboard interview started! It was absolutely hard! They told me to do a couple of things which pretty much resembled the algorithms I did 2 times on Ruby and JS here hahahaha

What is the job?

And now I guess the funniest part of them all?

I got 2 job offers one for java and one pretty lucrative to a really interesting company regarding SQL and COBOL!?! I’ve chosen the second one as it was more than I could dream of!

I was amazed that all these hours that seemed a bit worthless in the beginning of my journey through TOP were in the end sooooo indirectly important!

Tips?