The first bootcamp
This blog, intended to chronicle every step of my attempt to switch into software engineering, should have started a long time ago. However, it kept getting delayed due to the lack of time for reflection during my initial ramp-up, compounded by the constant reservation at the back of my mind about whether the career switch would eventually work out.
At this point, after relocating to Munich and having received software engineering job offers, I would consider myself to have successfully overcome the first hurdle of this career switch.
With the time afforded to me by Munich’s better WLB (compared to Singapore) and the Covid-19 lockdown, there’s no better time than now to start recounting the decisions made and the steps taken that brought me here.
When I made my decision to quit my day job as a Chemical Engineer, I was surrounded by friends who understood very well the challenges I was about to take on trying to become a SWE. They themselves have gone through the most rigorous SWE training programmes and courses available in their computer science (CS) undergrad years. With the guidance of these friends, and the help from their network, I was given special permission to volunteer in CVWO.
CVWO is a summer voluntary programme for NUS undergraduates to help build and maintain IT systems for Voluntary Welfare Organisations in Singapore. It had been run by Prof Ben Leong of NUS School of Computing for 11 years before I joined.
The programme appealed to different people for different reasons. For many years it was one of the very few paid summer internships available to Year 1 undergraduate students, allowing them to work on an IT system of medium scale. This has changed, of course, due to the increased demand for CS interns in recent years, no matter how fresh. Yet CVWO remains more popular than ever, thanks partly to its reputation for training up great SWE students.
I have known about this programme for years, hearing from some of its alumni, who happen to be my friends from highchool. For me the programme’s greatest appeal was its intensity, as I intended to ramp up and land a SWE job as soon as possible.
I got in partly based on my grades for CS1010S Programming Methodology, a course I took in 2016, during my last semester at NUS. Maybe in 2016 that would have been sufficient for admission into CVWO. But when I applied in 2018, the standards were much higher, and I was sure my application was given special consideration because of my friends’ referrals. I learned to never underestimate the power of connections.
Summer of 2018 was only the start of my journey. I got a chill team, great team leads, amazing teammates who had no qualms welcoming an older alumnus like me into their circle. Working with them certainly made the learning process a lot less torturous. By the end of the summer, I had become more comfortable with the git collaborative process, the main building blocks of web apps, and the SWE troubleshooting tools. But most importantly I made friends who taught me so many things that summer, and continued to teach me things long after the summer was over.
This chapter of my journey ended on a high note, as I managed to secure a job as Prof Ben’s research assistant. God knew what he saw in me to think that I could at some point take on his e-learning platform Coursemology, but that’s story for another post.
I was glad that I did not half-ass this, that I gunned for and got into the most intensive bootcamp available. It certainly would have taken disproportionately longer if I were to commit to a part-time bootcamp. I understand it might not be easy, or even possible, for others to try to switch into SWE the same way I did. I had little to lose in terms of lost time as I was still young in my career as a Chemical Engineer. Taking this leap of faith into SWE required me to have savings sufficient to cover several months of expenses. I got a job after 3 months, but it could have taken way longer. I was fortunate to have experienced friends who helped me understand and manage the risk of the switch.
Now when people ask me how they can switch into SWE, I try to help them assess their own commitment first, by asking them to attend an intensive Programming Methodology course (NUS CS1010X). If they have the self-discipline to follow through and complete the course with good grades, it’s a good sign. If not, they should consider the mismatch between their ambition and commitment and adjust accordingly.