S2E14: Switching from Public Health to Web Development with Jade Applegate

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.

The Tech Academy’s 15 week Software Development Bootcamp is one of the most thorough and comprehensive of any school. Whether you’re 18 or 70, you can learn computer science fundamentals and a whole range of coding languages. Enroll this month for a special discount. Find out more at learncodinganywhere.com.

Want to get into the most selective coding bootcamps? Check out Flatiron School's Bootcamp Prep course. With over 70 hours of curriculum, you'll go from code newbie to acing the bootcamp admissions process. For a limited time, access the course for free. Head to flatironbootcampprep.com today.

Hey listeners, welcome to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I am your host, Laurence Bradford. In today's episode, I talk with Jade Applegate. Today Jade is a software engineer at Fastly and a founding member of their UX team. However, that wasn't always the case. Before switching careers, Jade worked in public health.

In our conversation, Jade shares what it was like attending General Assembly's web development immersive bootcamp, how she went about finding her first job in tech as a software engineer, and much more. Remember, you can get Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, at learntocodewith.me/podcast. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Hey Jade, thanks so much for talking with me today.

Jade:
Hi, thank you.

Laurence:
So real quick, could you introduce yourself to the audience?

Jade:
Yes. My name is Jade Applegate. I am a former project manager/business consultant turned coder. I work at Fastly which is a real time CDN as a user experience engineer.

Laurence:
Awesome, that sounds so fun. User experience engineer. So I've been looking at your LinkedIn and your background before hitting record and there's a bunch of stuff I want to get into that I'm looking at here. Let's just kind of go pretty far back in time, you said you did project management and was a business consultant. What did you study in college?

Jade:
My undergrad degree is pre speech pathology. They called it communication sciences and disorders. It was a lot about language acquisition and linguistics. Some of which that information is super helpful to me today, but it was mostly focused on being in a clinical setting, providing one on one speech therapy. Towards the end of my career in college as we got into a lab setup, I realized it really wasn't for me, that one on one experience. I spent a few years working in project management at the Harvard School of Public Health and then we moved to San Francisco where I started working in a related field in education, doing executive search for non profit organizations. Which is totally a thing apparently.

Laurence:
Wait, executive search for...

Jade:
For non profits. So we found C-Level people for hospitals, health care, education, so like the UC system, non profit organizations, big hospitals, foundations, things like that.

Laurence:
Okay, got it. I definitely have heard of people doing C-Level recruiting before.

Jade:
Yes.

Laurence:
But you were doing it kind of specific for non profits.

Jade:
Exactly.

Laurence:
Nice. It sounds like you sort of have a background, I guess it makes sense if you studied linguistics in college, but stuff relating to health, is that right?

Jade:
MmHm.

Laurence:
Now you work at Fastly, which they do, it's like a CDN?

Jade:
So completely different fields and that was kind of by design, that was my choice as I switched careers. Fastly is a CDN that serves traffic on the internet so whether you're tweeting or reading on New York Times or CNN or pinning something on Pinterest, that's backed by Fastly. So we're helping other people, other services on the internet serve traffic faster.

Laurence:
Very cool. I feel like I sort of skipped ahead, I should have waited a bit to ask about Fastly. You were living in Boston, you were working at the Harvard School of Public Health, you were doing project management, you moved out to San Francisco and then you were working again out there doing the C-Level search for non profits. How did you first start learning how to code? What even sparked that interest?

Jade:
Yes. It was at when I was doing consulting, the C-Level search stuff, when the firm embarked on a project to update their website, so they hired an external consultancy and it ended up taking three years. Technology changes a lot in three years. That's what kind of sparked my interest because I was thinking this project is way overblown, the scope is crazy, the deadlines are not...like how did we get here? So I started thinking about building websites and how that process worked. Meanwhile, most of our friends out here in San Francisco work in tech or are tech adjacent and so I started just kind of asking them some questions, seeing what their jobs were like, what types of coding they did, and decided to take a leap into a full time bootcamp.

Laurence:
Okay, so it sounds like you were speaking to the people in San Francisco and you pretty quickly decided you wanted to learn how to code and then went to a bootcamp right away or did you kind of play around on Codecademy first?

Jade:
I took about a month off between jobs. I went to Hawaii, I went home. Then there was a lot of prerequisites that we needed to do for the bootcamp. I think it was about 60 hours if I'm recalling correctly, that were like Codecademy, some other online tools, some proprietary tools that General Assembly had developed. It was really just to set the baseline, especially in terms of HTML and CSS. Those weren't really skills they were planning to teach us. They expected us to come in with some working knowledge of those. The first week we really dug into code and they expected us to really have knowledge of HTML, CSS, command line tools, things like that. I spent some time on my own before the bootcamp getting up to speed on those sorts of things.

Laurence:
Nice. How long was the bootcamp for?

Jade:
It's 13 weeks. I think it's 12 now. It was five to six days a week depending on how you did it. Meaning that usually I was on location on Saturdays working on projects but we didn't have instruction on Saturdays. It was full time, it was technically nine to five although I was usually there from nine to nine or later. I gave myself a deadline every night that I could go to bed at one a.m., regardless if I had finished everything, so I would still have enough time to sleep and be fresh for the next day. It was definitely an intense experience.

Laurence:
Yeah, wow. I feel like when I talk to a lot of people who go to coding bootcamps, pretty much always they say it was a very intense experience. A very full time, you can't really do much outside of that, as in other work or keep a full time job or something.

Jade:
No. I just told everyone I knew, "I'll see you in three months." You don't have a social life. It's also what you put into it. If you're just kind of casually taking it and maybe or maybe not completing the assignments, you're going to get less out of it. Since it's for a fixed amount of time, I was able to look forward to when I could go back to having a more sane scheduled. It ends.

Laurence:
Yeah. I'm kind of circling back again here but before you went to the coding bootcamp, making that decision, was that difficult for you? Quitting your other job and totally changing paths at that point in time?

Jade:
Yeah. I actually ended up quitting my job before I knew I was accepted. I had applied so I was really just crossing my fingers on that one. Everything worked out so it was great, but there was a two week period where I was just really hoping that I would get in so that everything would work out perfectly. It was definitely nerve wracking.

Laurence:
Yeah. Even when you started the coding bootcamp, were there moments where you questioned, "Did I make the right decision?"

Jade:
Oh for sure. I think everybody has that imposter syndrome. Even now there are times in a regular day where I'm like, "I don't feel like I'm qualified to do this," or "I don't feel like I know what I'm doing."

Laurence:
Or "How did I get here?"

Jade:
I know. So that was really strong early on, but everybody was there trying their best and really supportive of each other and so you kind of just had to brush that off. There were always going to be things that you didn't know, but if your focus was instead on learning more and not focusing on what you didn't know, I think it was a different, better mindset to be in.

Laurence:
Oh, I love that. Can you repeat that? Focusing on what you...

Jade:
What you do know and that you're continuing to learn.

Laurence:
Yes, that's great.

Jade:
Rather than just freaking out about, "I don't know this, I don't know this." Using it as a motivation to learn more things. I just had a running list of, "I don't know what this word means, someone mentioned this and I don't know what that is." At the end of the day I just looked them all up.

Laurence:
Yeah, definitely. I feel like that mindset is important. Instead of being negative about everything you don't know, a person should try to be positive and think of all that they're learning every day. I've always called that the glass half empty vs. half full or sometimes I'll even say an abundance mindset. So thinking of everything you have rather than thinking of what you don't have.

Jade:
Exactly, because also, we're learning so much everyday. Even if you only understood 80 or 90% of it that's still good.

Laurence:
That's a lot, that's really good.

Jade:
There's just tons of content coming at you and it's up to you to keep up. If maintaining that kind of attitude to encourage yourself helps, it's not really worth digging into how much you don't know or getting down on yourself.

Laurence:
No, I love that. I think that can apply to anyone, if they're even in college, in a CS program, coding bootcamp, learning on their own, having that positive mindset, yeah exactly. Even if you're learning 80, even 50% of what's being thrown at you in a coding bootcamp or any kind of intensive course, keeping that knowledge is super impressive. So you went to the coding bootcamp and you were there for about 12-13 weeks. How soon after did you get your first job in tech?

Jade:
I took three months off afterwards to prep for interviews, to continue to learn, to drill on my skills. I kind of purposely delayed the process. Once I started applying to things and got real about it, I would say the whole process was around 45 days, like a month and a half.

Laurence:
Okay cool. So you wrapped up the bootcamp, you took three months off where you continued learning on your own and prepping for interviews. Out of curiosity, what did that look like? When you continued learning and prepping for the interviews?

Jade:
That was anything from working with someone else or someone that I knew from school or someone that I knew that worked as a developer and having them say, "Hey, build this thing, can you prototype this," or just quizzing me on questions about the DOM or classes or whatever they could think of. That also include me working on my personal site, polishing up some things, doing mock interviews, whiteboarding. Just to kind of get comfortable with the process.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's great.

Jade:
For me the whiteboarding and the technical interviews were really nerve wracking, so to be able to just practice that and shake out some of the nervousness was really helpful.

Laurence:
Yeah, I think that's probably one of the most nerve wracking things for most people. If not all people. Probably 90%.

Jade:
Yeah, I was so scared.

Laurence:
Do you have any advice for listeners, how they could prepare, anything you did that you think really helped you when it came to interview day?

Jade:
I think having practiced ahead of time, or at the very least, not going into your dream job interview as the first time that you've every whiteboarded in front of someone. Maybe do a couple throwaways so you get comfortable with the experience. Also realizing that the person on the other side is likely not a professional interviewer. They're probably a developer, they probably feel a little awkward too. They may or may not have training in how to interview people, so just kind of humanizing them a little bit and practicing helped a lot.

The other thing that was really helpful was asking clarifying questions or confirming what I was thinking that they were asking. The goal really isn't for you to pick up a marker, have them give you a prompt and you to just write it out like you're on A Beautiful Mind. They want to have a conversation with you about your thought process or the trade offs of something or different approaches you might have. The goal of that is not for you to just regurgitate something you've memorized onto a whiteboard. Once I kind of got out of that mindset it helped a lot.

Laurence:
Sit tight podcast listeners, we're taking a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors.

The Tech Academy is a licensed career school that trains students in computer programming and web development. Become a full stack junior developer at the 15 week Software Development Bootcamp. Suitable for those of all ages anywhere in the world. Learn computer science fundamentals and a range of coding languages, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, at one of the most thorough and comprehensive bootcamps. No tech background or previous experience necessary.

After completing the bootcamp, the Tech Academy staff can help you launch your tech career through the job placement course. It really works. 95% of Tech Academy graduates land a tech job with an average starting salary of $60,000 per year. Enroll this month for a special discount. For more information, contact the Tech Academy through their website at learncodinganywhere.com.

Flatiron School's online web developer program equips you with the skills to get a job as a developer, guaranteed. You'll learn to code with real developer tools and a rigorous 800+ hour curriculum that covers the programming languages you'll need on the job. Flatiron's 98% job placement rate and their job guarantee mean you can change careers with confidence. Flatiron is offering Learn to Code With Me listeners $500 off your first month of the program. Head to flatironbootcampprep.com to start learning to code and to redeem the discount when you apply. Again, the URL is flatironbootcampprep.com.

Not ready for a coding bootcamp but still want to learn how to code? Dive into JavaScript, Ruby, Swift, and HTML and CSS, with Flatiron School's free online courses and certificate programs.

Yes, that just reminds me, the week that we're recording this, last week I took part in a panel at Flatiron School in New York and one of the other women there is VP of engineering at ClassPass and it's just so fresh in my mind, which is how I remember it. Of course she interviews tons of candidates and she said that they don't expect people to be perfect in their whiteboard interview, they kind of expect you to make mistakes. One of the most important things is exactly what you said, communicating the entire time what you're doing, asking those kind of clarifying questions to make sure you're on the right track. She said that's just one of those things that can really show how you'll be in the day to day. Of course people want to work with coworkers that'll have good communication skills, right? They're going to ask those kinds of things to make sure they're on the right track. I love that advice that you gave.

Jade:
Yeah, I mean that's what they're trying to figure out. Like are you a good problem solver, are you a good communicator, and if all you do is just silently write out what you think the answer is on the board, you're kind of missing the mark.

Laurence:
Yeah, totally agree. Even if you get it right, they still want to see you have those communication skills and other kinds of problem solving skills. I love that. So after the three months of prepping, you then said it took you maybe about 45 days of interviewing for jobs to finally accepting an offer. Could you just talk maybe a bit about how you went about your job search? I guess caveat, we haven't mentioned this yet, but Jade, you're based in San Francisco. Where I live right now in New York, there's a lot more tech jobs than I know in some other cities in the US. Nonetheless, could you kind of explain how you went about the search?

Jade:
The number one thing for me was just telling everyone I knew that I was looking for a job, which is exactly how I ended up coming to Fastly. Someone said, "Oh we have an open position, you should interview for it." So I was broadcasting widely that I was looking. You never know who might be looking for engineers with a company. I also reached out to people that maybe I had not talked to in ten years. That was like a friend of a friend or someone's roommate. Those kind of tangential relationships I just kind of capitalized on. Like, "Hey, I haven't talked to you in awhile. I just wanted to let you know that I just did this bootcamp thing and it was great. Now I'm looking for a full time position if you know of anything." Just kind of putting your feelers out. People can't help you if they don't know you're looking, right?

Laurence:
Yes, I love that.

Jade:
Having that network out there and also I feel for weeks all I did was pick people's brains and buy them coffee and just get out and meet people and find out who they know who's hiring or what their experience was like as they did a career transition. Just to kind of learn more about what the opportunities are.

The other thing that's important is to figure out what type of company, what size, that might be a good fit for you. I knew I didn't want to be one of two engineers. I knew I wanted a more structured situation with more mentorship. You have to figure out exactly what situation or scenario or type of company is important to you. That also helps to kind of narrow down the scope of looking for any job. Then you have some reasons why you might want to work at a company that. You also have to be picky on your side, I guess is my point. I was looking for a very specific scenario. I wanted around this many people to work there, I wanted them to be around this amount of funding. That kind of narrows the pool down. Then I just interviewed and sent out feelers or requests and invitations to coffee and all sorts of things.

Laurence:
Yes, I absolutely love that advice. Actually this reminds me of something, a few months ago when I got my full time job where I work now here at Teachable. When I decided before that I wanted a full time job, I was very specific in my job search. It ended up working out really well for me. Ever since then I always tell people the same thing. I actually think being more narrow and more specific and really knowing, exactly as you said, the companies you want to work for, the industry, the size, what their mission is, and all these things can help you stand out more I think as a candidate. I'm curious, how many companies did you end up interviewing at?

Jade:
That's a great question. Like onsite multiple interviews, four. You also have to make sure that you also want to be interviewing there and you don't waste your own time. Usually they are really involved. These are multiple days with multiple hours of interviews. If you're not into it, maybe you don't want to waste your time there. Being selective is good.

Laurence:
Yeah. There's a quote that I love, I think people have probably heard this before, but 'Finding a job is a full time job,' or something.

Jade:
Oh my gosh, yes. And I'm not like a naturally extroverted person. I really need a lot of alone time to reset so going out and meeting with people back to back to back is not my natural state. Meeting people that I barely know for coffee is not my natural state so I really had to get outside of my comfort zone which was a good experience and not something I would normally do but kind of necessary in this case.

Laurence:
Yeah, I think even for extroverted people, at least having the onsite interviews, where you can be meeting four to six, even more people, it's like an all day thing. Of course it's draining, you know?

Jade:
It's so draining.

Laurence:
Yeah, it's so draining. Even before that point, just applying to jobs and the emails and the back and forth and the finding the times. Then the research and the prepping, hopefully everyone is doing that, right? Before they go into the interview, their research on the company and practicing the questions. Again, as I've seen on your LinkedIn, you've now been at Fastly for over two years so it seems like things have gone quite well.

Jade:
Yeah, I don't want to just say I got lucky, because I think I also worked very hard and I think it's important to call out hard work when you put a lot of effort into it.

Laurence:
Oh yeah, of course.

Jade:
I feel like I am really excited to come to work every day. Sometimes I find myself on Friday nights almost stalking my boss and being like, "Hey, just really want you to know that I love my job!"

Laurence:
Oh, that's so awesome. I love hearing when people say that. I feel the same way. I feel like life's too short to not love what you're doing every day. Where you're spending most of your waking hours, right, Monday through Friday.

Jade:
It's all of your hours really. You're never not thinking about work, right? I've really enjoyed my time here and I've had the opportunity to see the company grow from somewhere around 100 people to around 300 so it's been definitely a period of lots of change, which I like. I think I kind of knew that I was getting myself into that when you join an early startup.

The other thing I wanted to mention about the job search is that it is a full time job but you also have to, it can't be a 24/7 thing. You have to give yourself a break. You can't just stare at your computer all day waiting for emails to come back in. Every day at five p.m. I would just say, "Okay, I'm done with coding or sending out resumes today." Or just taking little breaks, because you can drive yourself crazy. Hitting refresh and seeing if someone responded to you. I think it's important to carve time out for yourself when you're job searching, and taking good care of yourself otherwise you're going to drive yourself nuts.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's awesome advice. During the day of your job search, let's just a typical nine to five-ish hours, eight hours or whatever that is. You were sending out resumes and following up on getting coffee with people. Were you building other kinds of coding projects at that time too?

Jade:
Not as much. I was mostly focused on interview prep at that point. I felt like I had a couple solid items as part of my portfolio. I was also building tiny prototypes of things just to stay fresh with my skills. Like if I wanted something to look like this, how would I make it? Or if I wanted to mock up an existing website, how would I go through that process. It was mostly little drills than building any one thing.

Laurence:
Yeah. As you said, you already had a few things to show at that time. You had some projects in your portfolio.

Jade:
Yeah, that's one of the benefits of the bootcamp was that you build your portfolio while you're there. You have some individual projects, you have a group project. Of course that depends on where you go and what you do. It helps you to kind of build a portfolio and then you can also add features to what you've already built. You can change the designs, you can kind of iterate on those projects rather than starting from scratch.

Laurence:
Yeah, definitely. I love so much of the stuff you shared with finding jobs and the coding bootcamp and especially the job stuff. Personally I love hearing about people's job hunt experiences and what they did and what they didn't do and all of that. I have a question for you, if a person is in a similar situation and they taught themselves how to code or just finished a coding bootcamp and they want to get a job as a software engineer, what is the single most important thing they can do to find the right job?

Jade:
It's hard for me to answer that. It's kind of a combination of a lot of things. You will hopefully have built, and this seems like kind of a copout to your question, but hopefully you will have built projects you are proud of and can iterate on during the process. Hopefully you've learned how to learn more things, you've learned how to explore things on Stack Overflow and look things up. Part of it is just learning how to continue to learn.

The other part is interview prep. Staying on top of that and not getting discouraged is a really big part of it. It can really seem like no one is going to give you a job and you can't get a job without experience and you can't get experience without a job. It just seems like it's like this chicken and egg situation. I would say overall, probably the most important thing is to just not overwhelm yourself. Give yourself space to search for a job you want, not just any job. Give yourself space to turn off the computer at certain points in the day so you don't drive yourself crazy. Leverage every single person you've ever met, regardless of how loosely affiliated you are with them.

The process takes time, it's not going to happen overnight. There are also certain times of the year that are also more challenging than others to try find a job. Like around the holidays is kind of tricky because people are away and it's hard to get people rounded up. Keep that in mind as you're looking. Nothing happens overnight. Try your best. You're probably going to trip over yourself a few times, but this is all new and you're learning so just give yourself space and forgiveness was helpful too.

Laurence:
I love that. Thank you so much Jade for coming on. Real quick, you kept mentioning interview prep. Do you have any books or websites that you used to help you prep for those interviews?

Jade:
Yeah, it depends on the type of role you're looking for. If you're looking for a very heavy computer science type role then you might want to look at Cracking the Coding Interview. If you're looking at more of a frontend type of role, I can't think of a particular resource right now but I'll try to get back to you with that. The other thing that was really helpful to me was a site called Interview Cake. Which was basically a once a week programming interview question. You can access all of their previous questions, so it was a nice way to just kind of drill interview questions that I didn't have to come up with by myself. And also, of course after you've figured it out you can look at the answer and see what you might've done wrong. That was a big resource for me.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so funny. Parker Phinney, the founder of Interview Cake, was on the podcast last season. He's also, we work in the same coworking space today.

Jade:
That's so funny. He's a friend of ours, he used to live out here and moved to Brooklyn.

Laurence:
That's where I live now, in Brooklyn. He's literally down the hall, I see him every day.

Jade:
He's a great guy. That resource is really helpful. There's a lot of content on their site about how to search for a job, especially if you're looking at roles that are really going to value those types of CS type questions in their interview process. It's a really good repository for those.

Laurence:
Yes, I'm glad you mentioned that. It's a great resource. Well Jade, thank you so much for coming on the show. Finally, where can people find you online?

Jade:
I am @JadeApplegate on Twitter, that's probably the best way to find me.

Laurence:
Okay, great, on Twitter. Thank you again for coming on.

Jade:
Yeah, thank you!

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Jade. Again, the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, can be found at learntocodewith.me/podcast. If you're listening to this episode in the future, simply click the search icon in the upper navigation and type in Jade's name. If you liked this episode, head 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. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next week.

SPECIAL THANKS TO THIS EPISODE’S SPONSORS

The Tech Academy: If you’re looking for a bootcamp that will prepare you for a career in tech, sign up for the Tech Academy’s 15 week Software Development Bootcamp. Head over to learncodinganywhere.com and take advantage of this month’s special discount.

Flatiron School: If you’re looking for a career change, sign up for classes today at flatironschool.com. Don’t forget to take advantage of the special Learn to Code With Me discount and get $500 off your first month!