S2E1: From teacher to GitHub employee with Briana Swift

Laurence:
Hey, it's Laurence Bradford. Welcome to Season 2 of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, where I'm chatting with people who taught themselves how to code and are now doing amazing things with their newly found skills.

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Hey listeners, welcome back to the first episode of Season 2 of the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I'm your host, Laurence Bradford. In today's episode, I talk with Briana Swift. Briana is a former elementary school music teacher turned a trainer at GitHub. Briana is entirely self taught. In our conversation, we dive into how she taught herself how to code, plus the steps she went through to get a new job in tech.

If you're looking to make a career transition, this episode is for you. Remember, you can get the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, at learntocodewith.me/podcast. Enjoy the interview!

Hey Briana, how are you?

Briana:
I'm doing well, how about yourself?

Laurence:
I'm doing great. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Briana:
This is my pleasure. I'm excited to be here.

Laurence:
Awesome. So, if you could just briefly introduce yourself, that would be great.

Briana:
Sure. I'm Briana. I now work as a trainer at GitHub, so I work with a lot of developers, kind of teaching them how to use Git and GitHub in their workflow or in their hobbies. I started off as a music teacher. Even six months ago I was working in an elementary school and taught myself JavaScript and was hoping to be a developer, but then found this position that I'm really happy with.

Laurence:
That's so awesome. Remind me again, where are you from?

Briana:
I grew up in Kansas City but was teaching in central Illinois and now I'm living outside Chicago, so very Midwest-Central focused.

Laurence:
Okay, great. So you're living outside of Chicago now, that's fun.

Briana:
Yeah, I'm really enjoying it so far.

Laurence:
Awesome. So when did you start teaching yourself how to code?

Briana:
I guess when I really got serious about it was when I started teaching, which was a few, maybe two years ago. But I've kind of been working with it for a long time. Codecademy was up there when I was in college and I was working that a little bit, but even when I was in middle school I was working on building really simple HTML pages with my friends, so I always had an interest. I didn't really get serious about learning it until about
two years ago.

Laurence:
Got it. So how then did you end up doing teaching? Did you also have a really strong interest in that, I would imagine?

Briana:
I did. I had a strong interest, specifically in music. I started college as a vocal performance major, which is like an opera major. But then didn't really want to be an opera singer, it wasn't really for me. I found myself loving choir and wanting to be a choir teacher. If any of you have any music college experience, sometimes music education, if you want to work at a high school, there's just so many more elementary schools and there's just so many more opportunities there. So I started teaching at an elementary school and had a lot of fun with that age group.

Laurence:
Okay, so you initially studied music in college. Did you go back later and get some kind of degree in education?

Briana:
I switched majors in the middle. Luckily there was a lot of overlap with the music education and the performance classes.

Laurence:
Okay, cool. Right when you said music I circled that, because I'm taking notes as I'm writing. I think it's really interesting, last season there was an episode with someone. He is a software engineer at Asana. Before he decided to switch careers into software development, his background was music and he did a bunch of stuff with producing music and creating music and he really had a pretty long career in the music industry.

I'm not a musical person whatsoever but my dad is and he works in tech and a few other people I can think of. Do you think there's any parallels between music and learning how to code or anything to that end?

Briana:
Oh my gosh, yeah. I think the parallels are huge. I think they range from as simple as anyone that studies an instrument or composition seriously has that really self-driven nature to them. I think you need to have that if you're going to learn to code. But I think even further than that, I was also, in my derailment of switching majors a million times while I was in school, I was a composition major for a few years, and I can think, right off the top of my head, of five people I studied with who started off in music composition and now are working in tech, most of them in programming in some way now. I don't know exactly what the connection is neurologically, but I think there's definitely something there. It's a little creepy almost even.

Laurence:
Yeah, now I'm thinking of a few key areas that people will often transition from and I think music was one. I think also law was one, just because a lot of people who study law have a very intense attention to detail and they really see these facts and these patterns and I guess it's pretty translatable.

Briana:
Go figure, yeah I hadn't thought of that. Law, it makes sense.

Laurence:
To me, of course the really obvious one is language learning because they're both learning programming language or learning a foreign language. I think there's definitely parallels there, which reminds me of a lot of the people and I know, Free Code Camp, which I'm sure we'll start talking about in a bit, but a lot of the people in Free Code Camp who are teaching overseas and teaching English overseas.

Briana:
Yeah, absolutely.

Laurence:
All right, so you began teaching yourself about two years ago. You were working as a teacher at the time, teaching music, working with kids in elementary school. About at what point did you start looking for jobs in tech?

Briana:
Well, I loved teaching but pretty much as soon as I started I kind of saw that it wasn't something I wanted to do for my whole life. I wanted, I mean, I'm kind of addicted to change and the same structure for the same days, you know, for the whole time until I retired, drove me nuts. So I pretty much started immediately looking into other opportunities that would work with my skill set and that I enjoyed.

It started off as, during my lunch breaks, I would go on Codecademy, this is before Free Code Camp even was around. It was really relaxing for me to just go through those simple exercises and kind of let my brain forget about whatever else was going on. I found it to be really kind of an escape. As I got further into it, I started to realize how it was actually possible to teach myself what I needed to know to start applying to jobs. I thought about, if I were to learn something for free online, I knew I didn't really want to pay to go back to school. I didn't want to stop working in the meantime, but if anybody had the tools to put all of their
knowledge online for free, it would be people that know how to make the internet. I was like, 'that's fun, it's such a creative thing to do.'

There's so many roles you can play within that. I kind of committed myself to learning JavaScript and I started through all of Codecademy's courses and like you said, Free Code Camp played a big role in it for me. I started applying for jobs seriously about eight months ago over the new year break for school, just to kind of get my feet wet and see how much more I really needed to learn before I would be a viable candidate for any development positions. I don't know, sometimes it felt like a long journey, sometimes it feels like it was a short journey.

Laurence:
Yeah. I'm just so curious, when you began applying to these roles, were you ever nervous or afraid that you weren't ready, or something like that?

Briana:
I kind of assumed I wasn't ready, but at that point, I wasn't even sure what else I needed to really know. So I was hoping to get some feedback. So if I got turned down I was hoping I could get some knowledge of what I would need to do better next time so that I could learn that more. I threw my resume everywhere like spaghetti at a wall and I heard back from about half of them, you know, all no's.

I got one or two technical screenings and one of them was, oh my gosh, one of the technical screenings made me feel so bad about myself. I had my resume, it was really clear about what, like JavaScript, and all the frameworks I knew and I'm sure, you can relate to this, looking at job postings, it looks like they list every language and you're not really sure if they really mean you're going to use all those languages on a day to day basis or not. So I was applying to ones with C# and whatever else on there that I really have no experience in.

So this one that I applied to, they knew I had no C# experience and I get the technical screening and it's timed online. I didn't know what language it was going to be beforehand, and it was all in C#. For me, it was so rough because if they would have asked those questions in JavaScript, I could have nailed it. But in C# I had no idea what they were looking for. So I just answered them in JavaScript and was like, "Here it is, you knew that I only knew how to write JavaScript." And I just didn't hear anything from them. So that was kind of discouraging, but all in all, that was the only, you know, 1 out of 20 resumes I sent out came back came back that way and actually made me feel worse. The rest of them were good opportunities for me to figure out what to focus on learning next.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's definitely great that you have that mindset, that it's a learning opportunity and just taking it as it comes. You said you applied to 20 different openings and you heard back from about half?

Briana:
Yeah, something like that. And it took awhile to hear back from a lot of them.

Laurence:
Yeah, I still think that's good though, especially for someone new coming on the scene. I don't know what the percentages are off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure if you, it's kind of like the job application, if you apply to 20 jobs and you get a phone screening, it may be at like one. Of course it varies by industry, that's a pretty good rate I think. It sounds like you're definitely having success early on, even if you felt a little under qualified, I guess I could say, for some of the positions.

Now, looking back on when you began applying to jobs, do you wish you began applying sooner or do you think it was about the right time for you or how do you think about that?

Briana:
For me it was the right time. A lot of it for me lined up with the fact that I was on break from teaching, so I really tried to treat it like a full-time job. I used this app called RescueTime to see how many hours a day I was putting in on it and tried to focus at least six hours a day just, either working on my portfolio and improving it, researching jobs, or applying.

So that I think had more to do with why the timing worked for me than how prepared I was. I think my actual skills, there's such a huge range of how prepared you can be, you know, to even consider yourself prepared. For me, I was mentally and emotionally ready. Ready to move on.

Laurence:
Yeah, because I speak to a lot of people and for the most part I think people wait too long to start applying for jobs. Of course there's some people who will start applying after maybe only learning for a month. It sounds like you applied at the right time. I think that's something that a lot of people can be really hesitant or nervous about when they start applying to different positions.

Briana:
Right. I think the timing for me was a little bit easier to figure out because I knew I had a little bit of a deadline with the next school year. I wanted to start applying in December and January so that by June, when the school year was over, I would have a concrete idea of what was going on before I had to commit to teaching for the next year.

Laurence:
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Okay, so then when did you start learning with Free Code Camp?

Briana:
You know, I don't remember exactly the date when I started, but I know while I was using Codecademy, I had kind of committed to keeping myself motivated with Twitter. So I was tweeting every day as I was coding, and if I remember right, I think Quincy, the founder of Free Code Camp, tweeted me saying, "Hey, you should check out Free Code Camp." Since it was, I had seen that they were around but after that tweet I thought about it more seriously and was like, "Okay, I'll look into this." And I did, I was really enjoying it.

I also had the unique opportunity to be a part of that community at a time when they were still really, really thirsty for contributors, which I think that a lot of open source communities are. It worked out that my skillset of teaching, you know after I went through their JavaScript challenges and their algorithm challenges, I was able to make some short video segments that just kind of went over basic computer science things and give those back and upload them to their site while I was still learning and using their other resources as a student.

Laurence:
Yes, I was going to mention that about how on the Free Code Camp YouTube channel, a lot of material on there is in fact you, or you're teaching it.

Briana:
Yeah, it's still kind of weird to me to think how it all happened so quickly. But yeah, there's a lot of, if you're interested in some basic computer science and JavaScript concepts, there's short videos of me in my living room, talking about them.

Laurence:
No, they're very good and it's so clear. I remember watching them and that you are a teacher, that you're an instructor, it's just natural to you to be in front of a group of people explaining concepts, which is definitely a great gift to have. And I think this is a perfect segue into your new role at GitHub as a trainer.

Briana:
Yes, it is a great segue. That's luckily how it worked in the job searching process too. You know, what started off as a contribution that I didn't really expect to get anything from directly, turned out to make my resume so much stronger for this position. What I do now is, like you said, I'm in front of people teaching them concepts about Git and GitHub.

When I saw the job description for the GitHub trainer, it was almost like, somebody pinch me. These are my weird list of skills that never combine in any other resume. It has the technical side but also the instructional side and so I threw my stuff at them, threw my resume, all the links to the YouTube videos up for Free Code Camp and was like, "Hey, if this is really what you're asking for then we should talk, because this sounds like me."

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so wild. I have a feeling I know the answer, but before you saw that job listing, did you even consider any kind of instructional trainer kind of role in technology?

Briana:
No. No, I hadn't at all. I knew that I would maybe eventually, to work more with people than with code all day, but I had this mindset, and I don't know if it's based in any fact or not, but maybe it's just a woman in tech or a young woman in tech, but I felt like I wanted to go in there and prove myself really with the hard coding skills and show that my skills are up to snuff in that department so that any other roles I had afterwards I would have, I don't know what the right word is, but that they would be respected technically also.

I don't know if that's based in imposter syndrome or that's based in something I've experienced I've forgotten, but I was really only applying to just development jobs before this one. I didn't think it would even exist, something like this.

Laurence:
Yeah. You know, I had a recent, or maybe it wasn't really that recent now, a similar evolution or realization I guess you could say, as you did, where initially I thought I wanted to be a web developer, software engineer. And then as time went on I was like, wait, but I don't know if I would want to write code all day.

Because I like all these other things. I like writing, I like connecting with people, I like doing this, I like doing that. Initially my feeling inside was like, "Oh crap, I wish I didn't feel this way because I've wanted to be a web developer now for over a year." I didn't want to change paths. I felt similar in the sense like, I want to prove I can do it. Yeah, so I definitely feel like there's others out there if both of us went through kind of a similar experience that there has to be other people feeling similar.

Briana:
Yeah, and I think there's a misconception that there's so many more jobs that are only coding all day. Whereas most of the developers I know, whether they're web developers or engineers on the services team that I work on, well yeah, there's definitely a lot of code, but so much of it is working with people too. That gets kind of, people don't see that, how much of their day it really is. I just think there's a lot more jobs that are a mix of skills than people realize.

Laurence:
Yeah, definitely. We were chatting before, and if you were listening to the show, in case you don't know, I started a full-time job back in July. One of the things that, and of course it makes total sense to me I just never really thought about it I guess, but their, at the company, it's small, there's a few teams. There's the engineering team, there's a customer service team.

Right now there's only a few customer service people and a handful of engineers, and there's a lot of back and forth between those two teams whenever something's wrong with a person's site and there's a bug and trying to resolve it. It's definitely not, for them here either, they're not just running code, they're interacting with people on the other teams and doing a bunch of different stuff. Yes, very good point. So when did you start working then, at GitHub?

Briana:
I started in mid-March. As you might remember, I thought that I was going to continue the school year all the way through to the beginning of June, and I really was not planning on taking any other job before the school year was over. Of course, as a teacher, I didn't want to leave my students before the end of the year. Even though I was a music teacher I wasn't anyone's main classroom teacher, I was just kind of the extra specials teacher. When GitHub called and I got an interview there, it was like, this is the kind of choice that you don't get to make very often and I would not be able to live with myself if I passed it up.

Laurence:
You know, if you don't mind, could we talk a little bit about the interview process? Maybe how long it takes and what you went through, because I know a lot of people are super curious, just in general, about interviewing for tech jobs.

Briana:
Sure. For GitHub, and I don't know if this is reflective of how other tech companies do hiring, or even if my own is reflective of what other people experience at GitHub. I sent my resume in and heard back from someone that they would like to schedule a short, 30 minute call, video call. So I called with someone who was another GitHub trainer at the time and it was really just like a quick chat, kind of get to know the general style of how you talk, answer a few basic questions.

From there it moved on to some more technical questions. For a trainer, those technical questions looked a lot more like what we would answer in class. Like, what's the difference between a branch and a fork, or something like that. So I answered those, but when I was answering them, I was thinking about how to write them out. Since I had made so many of those short YouTube videos, the questions lent themselves to that really easily. So I answered each of their questions with a short 2-minute video that I made in my living room. I'll never forget, as I was filming them my dog and cat, so I love my pets, were bouncing around the house and I'm sure the floor was squeaking from the dog and I was like, "Oh my gosh they are going to think I'm so weird sending them these videos of me in my living room." But it was like once I thought of it, I couldn't not do it. They're either going to love it or they're going to hate it. Luckily, they really liked it.

So I was supposed to do another call with them where I taught a class for 30 minutes and then had a video interview with four or five people for 30 minutes. But since I had done the short videos, they said, "Okay we already saw you teaching it on camera so let's move to the next step." Then it was more phone calls with who my manager was going to be, and then they invited me out to San Francisco for an on-site interview, which was like unreal. It was the coolest thing. Because here I am going in to teach elementary school, like my old job and then I'm like, "Holy cow I'm going to GitHub."

Laurence:
That's awesome.

Briana:
It's really cool. And the interviews there were, at that point honestly they didn't focus on anything too technical. They, at that point, they had my GitHub profile, they could see all the YouTube videos. I tried to make all of my technical knowledge really easy to find, if they were looking for it. So it was like five 30-minute interviews with two people each, just back to back to back. And it was so much more focused on, I guess you say the soft skills. Like, who are you really, how do you interact with people, what are your values, that type of thing. Just to see if we'd be a fit on a team. It was a little stressful because there were so many people. There was no opportunity to really get feedback. It went well enough because they offered me a job there, which I still am so, still feel like I'm living an awesome dream.

Laurence:
That's so great. I love that it kind of went that way and you shared that because I think it's so important, people get so caught up in the technical interview and I always say, okay, if you answer a couple technical questions, it depends on how many you're asked, a few things wrong, I think that's so much better than just not fitting in culturally. So having that cultural fit and getting along with the people you're going to be working with is so important. It definitely seems like at GitHub it's important to them as well since that's how all of your onsite interviews went.

Briana:
Well and I think, from my understanding, even if the more technical concepts, because I told them I was not sure what Git Cherry-Picking was at the time. Obviously as a trainer I really need to know that. But they seemed really open to pairing and I would just encourage people if they're nervous about the technical part of an interview, if there's any opportunity to do pairing with somebody that works there, you have an opportunity to show them your tech chops while still getting to know them, it'll be a more accurate representation rather than that traumatizing whiteboard code where you feel like everybody's scrutinizing you.

Laurence:
Yeah right, the causing people nightmares, the whiteboard interview, so yeah that's a good tip, thanks for sharing that. Asking to be paired. I'm going to write that down, make sure we have that in the Show Notes for this episode. That's a great tip there. So you're in San Francisco, you interview with several different people at the company and then they make you an offer and how soon did you start then?

Briana:
I think it took a few weeks. It was maybe like, the interview was something like the 9th and I started on the 14th. So actually it was a pretty quick turnaround. I don't know if that's always the case but I was so enthusiastic. I was so ready to go. I was like, "Let me start as soon as I can, I want to start!"

Laurence:
Oh, that's so great. And also I think, I guess this could also be a factor. We didn't mention this yet but you do work remotely.

Briana:
Yes.

Laurence:
So it wasn't like you had to relocate to San Francisco, which I think would definitely add some time on to the when you can start date.

Briana:
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Laurence:
That is another thing I know so many listeners are really into is the idea of working remotely. But it sounds like, for the other jobs you were applying to, for the more developer jobs, were any of those remote or were most of them in person?

Briana:
I think most of the ones I was applying to before were in person. I'd read somewhere, I don't know where it was, your first tech position should be in person and that people have had better experiences that way, so I was kind of leaning that direction, but I'm enjoying working from home. I definitely wanted to move this direction later in my career and I got lucky to do it earlier. But it is an adjustment from working in an office. I'd say it's about 80% awesome and 20% an adjustment.

Laurence:
So, correct me if I'm wrong, but do you get to travel at all for this role?

Briana:
We expect to travel about 50% of the time. Sometimes that's one week on/one week off. Most of the time as trainers, we're going out to companies and I get to teach developers how to use Git and GitHub, which is super fun for me. Sometimes we're also doing things like a hack house as a team, so we can work on some other projects. In general though, I'm really enjoying the balance of travel and working from home.

Laurence:
Cool. So, I want to wrap things up and I want to just end with a pretty general question. For other people out there right now listening and starting to teach themselves how to code and they eventually want to transition into tech, is there any kind of advice that you would give them to help them make that transition?

Briana:
I would tell them to find out that really is motivating you to change and to focus on that in as positive way as possible. So for me that was the job that I had, I loved it a lot, but I would kind of focus on the negatives in order to flip it to a positive so instead of feeling bad about this, I'm going to put that energy into working even harder today on this algorithm that I don't know how to solve, or something. For me, that was motivating.

So whatever it is that's motivating you to change and to learn, make that an actionable feeling and do something with it.

Laurence:
Awesome. And lastly, where can people find you online?

Briana:
Awesome, so on GitHub, I'm github.com/brianamarie and on Twitter I'm @brianamarie132. And tweet at me, that's the easiest way to get in touch. I love tweeting at people.

Laurence:
Okay, thanks so much Briana.

Briana:
Thank you Laurence.

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Again, the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, can be found at learntocodewith.me/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, head on over to my website, learntocodewith.me, where you can find even more awesome code-related content, like my 10 Free Tips for Teaching Yourself How to Code. Thanks so much for tuning in to the first full episode in Season 2. I'll see you
next week!

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