We conclude the tale of Alvaro Videla, who learned to code, got a job as a developer, and is now facing his first week on the job in Montevideo, Uruguay. He eventually went on to get jobs at Apple and other tech companies, but this is where he got his start. &nbsp; Article by Alvaro Videla:&nbsp;https://fcc.im/2zJX3gN Read by Quincy Larson: https://twitter.com/freecodecamp Learn to code for free at: https://www.freecodecamp.org Music: "Sounds of Wonder" by Vangough:&nbsp;https://fcc.im/2yQOq0q &nbsp; Transcript:&nbsp; The Technical Interview The programmer who was interviewing me explained how things would go, that I was going to walk right into their offices, get my own desk, and program at one of their computers, with everybody else just doing their jobs, since “that’s how it’s going to be if you join us.” I thought that was pretty cool already. And just like he said, once I got into the office, everybody said hello and continued doing their jobs. Even though I wasn’t close to getting the job, I was already starting to feel like a part of something. The test consisted of building a website to list books for an imaginary library. It seemed simple enough: connect to a database, fetch a list of books, and display them on a webpage, with the buttons for the usual actions for adding books, deleting them, and updating their information. “I can do that,” I thought. While I was focusing on the test, behind me were programmers who were splitting their time between working on their tasks and playing with tennis balls in a very particular way: they were throwing them at each other, with a lot of force, up to the point where one shot hit the reset button of one of the computers and one guy lost what he was doing on his editor. “That’s a strange way to work, but it’s kinda cool,” I thought. I had expected a more formal working environment, but was pleasantly surprised at how relaxed the environment was. Meanwhile, halfway through my implementation, I got stuck. I couldn’t get my code to print the list of books, and nothing was showing up on the screen. “How do I get out of this one?” I wondered. I tried to debug it by adding print statements here and there, but that didn’t work, and I had no idea what was&nbsp;going on. The clock was ticking away, and I was starting to get really desperate.&nbsp;“Come on,” I told myself. “I can’t miss this opportunity because of this problem. What do I do? Should I ask for help? What if this disqualifies me instantly?” I thought about it some more. “I guess they help each other during work,” I reasoned. “OK, whatever, I’m going to ask for help.” I called the interviewer over and talked him through my problem, trying to explain everything I had tried so far, so he wouldn’t think I was cheating him into giving me an answer. Lucky for me, he also had no idea what was going on, so he told me it was fine and that I could leave it as it was. Unfortunately, I had used too much time on this debugging session so I didn’t have enough time to complete the second part of the test. Later on, I would value this lesson, since I saw that asking for help earlier would have saved a lot of time later — time that in this particular case was critical for me. And in the future, it could be critical for the company I would end up working for. I didn’t want to ask for extra time to try to solve the next problem, since I thought that wasn’t fair. I wanted to play by the rules, because I felt it was the right thing to do. As we’ll see later, I think that decision paid off. In the meantime, I had the second problem in front of me and I had to do something about it. I skimmed through it and saw that it was about parsing URLs out of some log files, so I gathered some courage. I put my most convincing face and told the guy that while I understood my time was up, the solution was a matter of just “splitting these lines by these characters, and then going with...

Ep. 3 - How I Went From Selling Food in the Street to Working as a Developer at Companies Like Apple Part 3 - First Week on the Job

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Ep. 3 - How I Went From Selling Food in the Street to Working as a Developer at Companies Like Apple Part 3 - First Week on the Job

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