My Journey to Becoming a Software Engineer

Hello World!

I am very excited to be able to get the time to update my portfolio website with a blog! I thought of adding these updates a few years ago, but now it is finally complete. I managed to learn how to create blog posts without a backend server. How can this be done? I weighed my options and decided to go with Gatsby.js for my posts. All I need to do is create a Markdown file for each blog post and redeploy my app.

It's just like magic! This solution will allow me to save future costs on my website since I don't need to store my blog data in a database on a separate server. I can go further in depth on another post about this later!

My Background

My journey began during my college years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where I pursued a degree in computer science. As a sophomore in college, I obtained my first career opportunity as a software engineer intern. I worked as a VB .Net developer for the Wauapca Foundry in my hometown for the summer. I didn't know if I wanted to focus on a computer engineering or computer science degree until I started to gain more experience from my internship. This experience exposed me to the practical aspects of software development. I contributed to a real-world project! I designed a desktop app to perform basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, & Delete) operations in a relational database.

Following my first successful internship, I went back to college and secured my second position as a software engineer intern at Northwestern Mutual, a prominent financial services company. This opportunity provided valuable exposure to a corporate environment and allowed collaboration with seasoned professionals on diverse software projects. I worked on modernizing their mainframe billing and collections apps utilizing technologies such as PL/1, JCL, and SAS. My exceptional performance and dedication earned me a full-time position at Northwestern Mutual after I graduated from college.

After a year of working full-time on the billing and collections team, I wanted to get more exposure to working with a modern technology stack. Since most of the organization's tech stack was IBM software, it was difficult for me to get the experience. A new story made it into our team's backlog to get my foot in the door. I instantly picked up this story to collaborate with another squad called the Risk Servicing Ops. Our business requirements were to create a new bank lockbox unix script to collect premium check payments daily via SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol). I developed two unix scripts, one that gets premium data from a bank and then transfers that data into the mainframe for processing. The project was a success and permitted me to switch teams to work on other projects. I worked on the Risk Servicing Ops team for another year until I landed my current role at Liberty Mutual. I choose to move to a different job because of several reasons. The main factors were technology, salary, and benefits. I now get to work on a true modernization team using technologies such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), JavaScript (Node.js & React.js), and Java (Spring Boot).

My Goal for this Blog

Now that you know a little bit more about me, I want to explain the reason for this blog. My goal is to give my readers knowledge of the software engineering industry. I want to write articles that will help you in the future to prepare yourself to get a software engineering job if you have little to no experience. I want to help you to pursue your goals and give you a roadmap to what I would do if I were in your shoes to obtain a software engineer career.

Help Wanted

Here is a survey form if you want to help me out to see what YOU value the most for future blog posts that I write. I will collect the survey responses and focus on those topics that matter to you.

Thanks for taking a glance at my first blog post! I hope to create more valuable articles for you in the future.