"I feel a sense of loyalty and pride"

I caught up with Sam at the end of his Senior Fellowship to reflect on the entirety of the past 6 months of his time at Fullstack Academy. Sam never fails to deliver the best turns of phrase and I can't do any justice if I summarized his feelings, but they are deep. If you hear some silence in the recording, that's not a mistake, it was just that difficult to put this experience into words. We also turn the tables a bit and Sam interviews me about... interviewing!

• See Sam's past Checkins here.

• The consequences of transitioning from Student to Teacher

• What qualities do Fellows need to have?

• Patience. It's hard to resist solving problems for people or overhelping people.

• What training do you get on teaching? Yes - our instructors role play and the Fellows have to figure out how to teach them.

• Tips for fighting "As soon as you left, I forgot everything": Be OK with uncomfortable silences. Force the student to make an attempt.

• Live coding while you teach is the ultimate interview prep. Being able to talk while coding.

• The Beautiful Liminal period between School and Work. 

• The fellowship is not repetitive - you don't have to attend the lectures again. The main demand on your time is the workshops.

• What's teaching REACTO (algo problems) like? Scary. Priority queue optimized approach was something we didn't cover.

• LEARN HEAPS. HEAPS ARE GOOD FOR YOU.

• Personal Projects?

• React Native knowledge base

• Making a Study Calendar, Palendar - Material UI, Enzyme testing, SVG icons. 

• People care about cute animals

• What you learn from building your own apps

• Building a Portfolio? Conflicting advice from people on the importance of a porfolio

• The Job Hunt

• Network aggressively (the alumni network) vs Cold applying (3% success rate)

• Reflecting on Fullstack's impact

• Transitioning from a career in publishing where everything is subjective

• Strangely feeling loyalty to Fullstack Academy more than with college

• Speaking to future Sam: Working in a place a lot like Fullstack where mutual growth is prized, with space to explore network engineering.

• Digressing about TCP/IP vs GraphQL :)

• Questions about the Interviewing process

• CSS was a surprise - it's a function of what job you want. UI jobs will have CSS involved, backend jobs won't

• What to do when unexpected things happen in an interview?

• Steve Yegge: Get the job at Google

• Serenity Prayer

• Algorithms: Go for breadth rather than depth

• Don't spend more time on your Capstone

• Teach your interviewer if you can

• You Don't Know JS: Generators

Links:

• Check out Sam's Capstone Coordin-EAT on Github and Youtube
• Palendar on Github
• Sam on Github and Linkedin

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or any RSS based Podcatcher, or download episodes at impostor-syndrome.org! Send your questions and feedback to @swyx or [email protected]. If this story reminds you of someone you know, send it to them!