New Adventure into Full Stack Development
From finishing university in 2014, graduating with a 2:1 in Computer & Network Engineering, and going into industry in telecoms and working as a data analyst for just over 8 years, my world was flipped upside down when I found out I was being made redundant November 2023.
It's nearly one year later on now, and having experience with a variety of tools and techniques, dealing with things from creating data pipelines using bash/shell scripting, running these scripts within a crontab & ingesting it into a hadoop hdfs data lake, it has still been a tough time even trying to get through to the interview stage with applying for jobs, so much so that I saw a full stack developer course at Code Institute and have just started my 3rd week on the course - I will talk about those later, but for now I will be going over some of the things that I learned during my time at university and in industry.
During my time at university, all the way back in 2010-2014, I studied modules such as java, embedded programming (C), along with how networks worked and an optional module in unix/linux as well as electronics and mathematics in computing. I've always enjoyed the use of code, the frustration it brings, and then the sense of satisfaction and revelation when finding out where that semi colon you missed was! This was a big driver in my decision to apply for tech roles as a graduate as well. One of my most memorable moments of which, was one of the pieces of coursework where we had to design a webpage, which included a form with various validation rules, where my roommate (un)sympathetically said it took him weeks to learn how to use regex to be able to do the validation, and how screwed I was that I left it until the last day. As all good students do, he decided he would watch me doing this piece of coursework so he could laugh at me, only to declare he hated me half an hour later as I (somewhat more inefficiently) broke all of the validation criteria down, and created them all with embedded IF() statements instead, completely negating the need to learn regex when in a time-crunch situation. I have since learned about how regex works, appreciating how useful it can be when applied correctly!
Fast forward 4 years, when I graduated and started my graduate scheme, I worked with a system called PrOptima, which used SNMP polling to request get values of how the data centres were performing, as well as monitoring to see if they were approaching the designed capacity and any anomalies or unexpected behaviour in any of the systems. This included creating custom KPIs based on platform design decisions, expected limits and data throughput, to further understand how the network was performing, quickly becoming the design authority for the monitoring platform as a whole.
Supplementing onto this, after 2 years, I also started getting involved in the big data responsibilities within the team, whilst still performing my old role at the same time, this included various other duties such managing the connectivity flow both to and from the big data cluster, and feeds that were incoming into it, as well as external devices where we had to deliver various reports to that were created based on the data that was available from the data we had collected.
At the start these technologies included: HiveQL, Subnetting, Bash/Shell scripting & Unix systems
Over time, as the platform developed - new tools were added in to allow for more varied and user intuitive solutions to be provided, as a team this involved the addition of new Tableau servers within the cluster, allowing for the use of SQL to pull data sources into Tableau, use it's engine to further filter data & create new KPIs within it, that we could trend over time, over time resulting in the automation of the monthly performance and capacity monitoring dashboard, that was up to date within the previous 2 hours of data, available around the clock, whereas before it was manually generated, taking around a weeks worth of effort to create, and only being done once a month, meaning that data presented within went from being 7 days old (with data that had not been seen for as much as 38 days), to data that was only an hour or two old - and available on demand without having to wait.
Over all this time the hard skills that I had developed, in a concise list are: HiveQL SQL PromQL Tableau Visualisation Bash/Shell Scripting Unix Regex Java C HTML Javascript CSS
As I never got change to do too much 'developer' work, when I saw the Code Institute course advertised, I decided that as I now have free time, and had an interest in coding and development for a long time, now would be a good time to freshen up some of the skills (like HTML) that I haven't used in excess of 10 years, developments within the coding languages I haven't used in the previous 10 years, as well as learning some new skills, would tie in nicely to round out my understanding, build up a public portfolio and (hopefully!) get back into work in the future.
