I have been staring at this screen for 20 minutes, with Ritviz’s new song playing in the background and I have nothing.
This would be a very short post. Unlike my usual 3000 word blogs I write.
Thank you everyone who helped, been helping and will be helping as I start working remote!
A lot of people helped me in this journey. I took some time out to wrote a post about acknowledging each of them in a post I liked to call acknowledgmentation. Read more about that 24 letter word that I invented below!
balena and me!
I had a great overall interview experience with the team at balena. The interviews were fun, fair and equally challenging. It instantly felt like the match I wanted when I started to hunt for a job. The company is remote, open-source and it’s exactly what I wanted stack wise (Generalist ++). The people are awesome and the product has so much potential to expand. That I feel its really something I would enjoy working with day in and day out. I had about 5-6 rounds of interviews. 2 of them were technical with others being feedback on assignment, culture fit and final selection. The team really helped went above and beyond to make me feel comfortable going through each (The rounds can be super stressful). I won’t lie it was quite lively and I quite frankly enjoyed the entire process through and through. Folks I met were attentive, empathetic and extremely feedback oriented which made me go for balena hands down from the other offers I received in the past.
Reading more about balena and the company overall helped me feel that I would have a lot of room to grow as a software engineer there. I will be working on a lot of challenging projects dealing with reducing friction for IoT fleet owners, hobbyists and other professional working on our platform. The vibe just felt right and I am really looking forward to working with my team and growing there in the years yet to come. It will be one heck of a roller-coaster. I will be starting work in late April.
What will happen to Mixster going forward!
Mixster, the blog will stay as it is. I am starting a newsletter where I will be sharing a lot of good stuff each week. You can read the description for it. I have been helping out a lot of people in the community through Mixster. This just seems the right way to go forward.
Mixster, the side-hustle will have to rest for a while. These past couple of months have been quite hectic for the team as we finished quite a major documentation release for folks at Firecamp! I really enjoyed the work that I did there but it’s time for a new adventures. I be happy to be working in a consulting capacity if anyone needs me or my team to work on documentation. Safe to say, Mixster isn’t going anywhere, but I like to focus on my full-time job for now!
Before I forget, I received the Google Foobar Challenge awhile back.
… and won’t be attempting that for sometime. Until I am finding my next role. So, yeah this screen will stay as it is, I guess.
I was actually starting to write a post about how you could legit hack your way into the challenge by using mere keywords. Shame, I never reached the right motivation for it. For me the challenge was activated for “Python list comphrehenions” Try it out after searching a lot of other Python stuff. I was searching tons of things about Flask deployments and the Google QR tool. Whatever work, and if the challenge does unlock by that. Let me know down in the comments. Here’s some more I found floating around in the Flow Community.
- Arraylist java
- java abstract classes
- Python list comphrehenions
- C++ move semantics (Thanks Harshit!)
- This foobar invite generator seems promising (Credit: Flow Community)
Happy Hacking folks!
Getting a remote role as a fresher?
“It’s hard, about to get harder.”
… is what I replied after a brief pause looking back on my own journey on the podcast with Daniel Phiri. I will add a link to my newsletter when its released. Also yes, this is a promotion of my new newsletter, Mixster x Mixtapes (Need to find a better name for it tbh). I will be sharing a lot of opportunities, advice and wealth hand-picked from all over the internet to help people code better, write better, make use of opportunities better. I actually started an informal newsletter 2-3 months back posting opportunities and bit of advice that helped me find a remote job to a few friends of mine. So if you feel that you might like a mail from me every 2 weeks then feel free to join up! I feel this could be a great way to help folks going forward and grow the community!
Looking back on the journey
When I started searching for a job, I had 3 things in mind to look for in the roles that I was applying.
- Fully Remote or partly remote.
- Open-source or great company culture.
- Stack and technology that appealed to me.
Well, what would you expect? Easy enough filter. Decent profile/resume. Good networking skills. And, it only took this guy 9 months of cumulative searching, 80+ interviews, 12 take home assignments, 2 months of procrastination and imposter syndrome to get 4 solid offers (From 15 in total). With so many rejections and no replies without feedback that I couldn’t bring myself to calculate them all. Got offers from Google, Travis CI, Accenture and so many great startups. But, balena was the one that came about and really checked all the boxes. While looking back, I also wrote about my journey of becoming financially independent before. “It’s truly a great read” is what people are saying about it. I on the other hand agree with them wholeheartedly.
& that’s a wrap folks!
It’s been a crazy 2020, and it has all been leading to this! I couldn’t be happier to be honest! I hope you are doing fine and are safe! Let’s talk if we haven’t for sometime. I be happy to get on a call!
Till then, folks! Live in the mix!
Almost forgot to mention this amazing podcast that Daniel and I recorded recently which also got released today!
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