Reach out to People You Know and You'll Be Surprised: From Comedian to Developer with Scrimba Student Amy

The Scrimba Podcast

🎙 About the episode

Meet Amy Corson 🇺🇸! Amy is a recently hired new developer. She's also an aspiring comedian! During the pandemic, she realized she was unhappy with her day job and decided to change it. So: this episode is both insightful and funny!

In this interview, Amy talks about learning to code and how her brother, also a self-taught developer, introduced her to Scrimba. You'll learn about ghost buses, local coding meetups, and how help can come from the unlikeliest of places. Amy also teaches you how to pick a coding project you're not going to give up on, even if it might give you food poisoning. Ultimately, you will hear how Amy approached both studying and applying for jobs, how she prepared for the job interview that landed her the job she's doing now, and why vague emails from recruiters are even more stressful when you're in the mountains.

🔗 Connect with Amy

• 👩‍💼 Linkedin
• 🌐 Website
• 👩‍🚀 Github

⏰ Timestamps

• How Amy went from an aspiring comedy writer with a day job to learning to code (02:12)
• Amy quit her job and focused on coding (04:51)
• Amy landed her first developer job after a little over a year of studying! (06:20)
• How Amy approached learning to code (06:48)
• What projects did Amy build? (08:07)
• How Amy decided on a complex project, learned a lot, and avoided food poisoning (08:20)
• Ad break! Next week, it’s Patrick Akil! (10:17)
• How Scrimba’s Discord community helped Amy solve problems better (12:11)
• When did Amy decide to start applying for jobs? (13:58)
• How Amy tackled her lack of teamwork experience by joining a civic open-source meetup (15:02)
• What Amy did when she got stuck on her new project (17:38)
• Does Amy’s new job mirror her experience working on the projects at the local meetup group? (18:52)
• You don’t know who you know! (21:24)
• How Amy landed her developer job (25:14)
• What Amy did to prepare for her job interview (27:37)
• Why did Amy put work into presenting herself to the interviewers (28:58)
• How did Amy's technical interview go? (32:47)
• Amy almost two job offers at once! (34:29)
• How do you tell your prospective employer to hurry up? (36:22)
• How Amy got the job offer she ended up accepting while on a hike with no phone reception (38:15)
• Should you negotiate the salary for your first opportunity? (40:08)
• Junior developers are an investment (44:39)

🧰 Resources Mentioned

• The Front-End Developer Career Path
• Scrimba's Discord server!

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