An Update: On the Job Hunt! 17 Aug 2020

Today I did it: I logged into my Flatiron account and officially started my job search. The past few months have been a remarkable learning experience for me, almost as pivotal as my time at Flatiron itself. I wanted to give a small update about my progress over those two months before diving back into my regularly scheduled programming (hah!) and finally publishing that post about ActionCable in React.

Behind the Scenes

When it comes to software development, I am a mechanic. I love getting into the nuts and bolts of the backend: databases, APIs, and configuration. My proudest achievement at Flatiron was successfully deploying our Module 4 group project: FlatChat. This project embodied much of what I want in my professional career; I worked with a small, knowledgeable team to rapidly create a chatroom application on a tight timeline. We all had to work together to figure out how ActionCable would work across our tech stack in addition to the normal operations of uniting a Rails backend with a React frontend. Having gotten our application working locally, we wanted to push the envelope and deploy it before our showcase. Our team decided to use Heroku to deploy the Rails portion, and Netlify for React. This project was the first time I’d tried to host anything more complicated than this blog, and it was such a great learning experience! I learned about the benefits of Postgres over MySQL, CORS routes, and production vs. development configurations. The night before our demo, we were live. It was an exhilarating experience! I found a passion for what I came to know as DevOps, or the skills and tools that keep sites up and running safely and securely. After graduation I began exploring topics surrounding web application security issues, and stumbled across OWASP.

Keeping the Bad Guys Out

While building things is incredibly satisfying, I soon discovered how awesome breaking (and breaking into) things can be. I’ve always had a passing interest in cybersecurity, but after learning about and attempting to mitigate common web vulnerabilities during my capstone project, I became curious about how exactly these vulnerabilities got exploited. Enter TCM Security, a penetration testing, compliance, and training organization. Over the past 2 months I completed the Practical Ethical Hacking course and it opened a whole other world to me! I learned how to exploit common website, application, and operating system vulnerabilities including SQL injection, cross site scripting (XSS), cross site request forgery (XSRF), broken authentication, and buffer overflows. This course also taught me how to build a penetration testing lab, and how to use industry tools like nmap, Nessus, Burp Suite, and MetaSploit. I got hooked on the puzzle like nature of penetration testing; I love probing for weaknesses and puzzling out how to chain them together to gain root. After completing this course, I enrolled in the eJPT course to firm up my skills and gain my first industry certification! This fall I have enrolled in CompTIA A+ and Network+ courses to deepen my knowledge of hardware and networking concepts, and I hope to sit for the Security+ exam early next year.

Onwards and Upwards!

While my passions lie in DevOps and cybersecurity, I have a couple more steps on my journey before I am prepared for those roles. I’ve spent a lot of the past couple months networking and learning a lot of theory regarding both, but it is time to refocus and look for work in earnest. Coming from a background in the manual trades makes the career switch more difficult: most of my hard skills are not directly translatable to my chosen career path. However, instead of becoming discouraged, I’ve decided to broaden my perspective. Many professionals in my chosen fields come from IT support and software development backgrounds. I am stepping back into coding and I’m delving into networking basics to gain a solid foundation that will pay dividends in any role I accept. I am focused. I am driven. I am ready to get to work.