Chronicles of a Noob - Chapter 2

Two years have passed since the first chapter of The Noob Chronicles. It finished with some goals I wanted to achieve. Some I did and some I didn’t, which is good. Achieving all set goals can be a sign of excellent and accurate forethought, but it can also simply come down to stubbornness. Achieving goals, simply because they were set.

What’s even nicer, is to review previous goals and consider why they weren’t achieved. One goal was “learn algorithms”; too broad. Another was “finish my master’s thesis”; too obvious. As a result, learning how to better define goals is something to focus on from here on out.

In any case, my master’s degree (and therefore the thesis of course) is done. I enjoyed it, and graduate with a grade much better than I expected. It also took longer than expected, and that was down to two main reasons.

Firstly, the ideas I was coming up with as a topic were much too large in scope. This was largely due to underestimating how granular academic research should be, but also my lack of experience with building large scale projects from scratch.

Secondly, here in Germany, a common pathway into all industries is to first get a position as a working student. This makes a lot of sense. The company can evaluate you as a potential candidate. Like a taste testing a cheese at the super market. Even if you don’t get offered a position at that company, you get the experience of working in the field and can add that to the resumé.

So I decided to delay finishing my thesis until I landed a student job as I wasn’t confident that with a ‘Master of Arts in Creative Technologies’, that I would find it easy to land a junior software developer role. The degree sounds unrelated compared to ‘Master of Computer Science’. Over two or so months, I applied to eleven working student positions and got accepted at Siemens Energy in a full stack role. Three to four months in, two full-time positions became available and my application was again accepted. The timing was favourable, but all successful applications are. But additionally, as I’ve been told, it was my non-technical experience gained through multiple years of work experience in other fields, that helped tip the scale towards my side.

This is because the team I’m working in is small. There’s two software developers including me, three ML engineers, and a handful of business and communication members. So my colleague and I on the software / developer side, need to be much more than developers. We’re product owners and managers as well — in so far as managing ourselves and our projects in line with our team’s goals and company policies including cybersecurity compliance, marketing communication, etc. It’s startup vibes in a huge German energy company and I’m absolutely loving it.

Since the last chapter, I’m really happy with how my technical knowledge and skills are progressing. The concept of fundamentals all the way down is bearing fruits. My fundamental base of knowledge has seemingly been strong enough, whereby understanding problems at hand, reading through documentation of new libraries and working with programming patterns and design principles are not as grating as they were.

This approach of giving great importance to learning fundamentals, has also helped keep the temptation of turning to ML tooling at bay. Coding agents, Chat-GPT, Cursor, etc are in my opinion Pandora’s Boxes for anyone in the early stages of a career. They get you to the destination faster, and stimulate a feeling of having achieved the task — but achieving any task past the mundane and repetitive (which should be automated anyway rather than prompting an LLM) is built from two actions; learning and execution. In other words, getting it to run, but learning and understanding how it works and how to do it again.

I’m really happy too for my development skills now being sufficient enough to build my own cryptocurrency DCA trading bot. I get caught up much too easily in the roller coaster of markets and there are no services offering this with my exchange. So to build my own is such a fabulous reality of being a programmer.

Until the next chapter I’m looking forward to having a more settled schedule again. Working alongside University, while maintaining exercise and my standing as an acceptable boyfriend was a lot. While full-time work is also a lot, the conditions are Siemens Energy are more easy going than the norm and regardless of this, the consistency and set work times will help to create a clear division between work and personal time.

So until the next chapter (two years) I would like to:

• Hold down a solid sport routine of, on average, twice a week Jiu Jitsu and at least once a week swimming or jogging + skipping + calisthenics sessions.
• Start playing around with music again.
• Gain a much better understanding of how the internet is working, along with its main protocols.
• Build a static site builder with Go.