2017 was a year, that’s for sure. But it was also a pretty amazing year for me, so I thought I’d share it. I wrote a similar blog post last year to summarise my first year of really digging in to learn to code, but this year I jumped so far ahead.

January was a huge month for me so it gets three paragraphs to itself. At the very end of 2016 I applied for a job at a big tech consultancy in Sydney. 3 days into the new year I received an email with an offer of a phone interview. The job sounded amazing and I was so keen. I did the phone interview on my lunch break at work, and they sent me a code challenge to complete. So I took my shiny new python skills and sat down over the weekend and figured out a solution to the challange. Except being self taught, I didn’t write a good README. And I had to learn testing in python on the fly. And my code was a bit messy. And I didn’t make it through to the next round. And I was devestated. But my devestation just cemented my desire to get good and get a job.

Luckily, before I got my rejection, six days into the new year I did something on a whim that changed my life significantly. I sent in my application for the Women in Tech scholarhip to study Coder Factory Academy. I started dipping into my flextime at work, and did a couple of interviews for the course and scholarship. I was told it was very competitive and to not get my hopes up. With my earlier rejection fresh in my mind I did just that, and assumed I wouldn’t get it.

Meanwhile, I had been selected to talk at the WOOTConf miniconf as part on Linux Conf Au, and I presented my talk Hannah Gets Go-ing. This was my first ever conference talk, and it was pretty exciting to share my attempt at learning Go through a way that actually didn’t really work for me, though I did learn a lot along the way (I’m a firm believer in sharing failures as well as successes). During LCA, I received a call from Coder Factory, offering me their scholarhip, which I accepted and changed my life!

February was the end of my previous career and the start of Coder Factory. I’ve written enough about Coder Factory in other blog posts, but in short, February through to June was study time. It was intense and I learnt a lot about making my code readable, planning, design, documentation and source control, as well as having the time to really dive into Ruby and Javascript. Making a bunch of Ruby on Rails, Node, React and React Native apps gave me a good basis for doing actual work.

At the end of June I started a month long internship with Eventhub. I got to dabble in functional programming in React with Rambda, GraphQL and start up life in general. I also had a meeting with the amazing Fiona from Lookahead Search, who helped me shine up my CV and set me up with some potential employers.

In July I continued my internshp, and started interviewing for potential junior roles. Sooner than I knew I’d been offered a role with Scentre Group, and I accepted. I even had fun at the technical interview, which I think is pretty rare, so I took that as a good sign!

August was the start of my new job. I could finally say I was a developer and I get to enjoy going into work every day with smart people in a really amazing team.

In September I got to focus on speaking, presenting a talk on React Native to the iOS devs at /dev/world, and getting to polish my skills with the YOW Women in Tech speaker training workshop with Damien Conway.

October was just work work work (and fancy dinners, high tea and halloween fun).

November saw me remaking my React Native talk for a bunch of JavaScript developers at SydJS.

Feeling pretty settled in my current job, come December I started to listen to my aspirations of learning some Computer Science fundamentals, which is what I plan to focus on in the new year. CS50, basecs and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs will form the beginning of my learning. Bring it on.