🇬🇧🇺🇸 Bi-Weekly Progress #1

As I was talking in the last Amethyst Platform DevLog #3 , because of the lack of time and because I chose to focus my energy on other projects besides Amethyst Platform, I am now "re-inventing" these bi-weekly posts. Instead of a post about the progress on Amethyst Platform, I'll make some general progress posts, where I will write some things about what I did in the past two weeks, related to my professional endeavors and side projects.

Initially I started the Amethyst Platform devlog series as an attempt to join the #buildinpublic movement: indie builders building their side gigs in public, aka documenting publicly every step of the way as a marketing effort.

But now that Amethyst Platform is unofficially on hold, I still choose to post every two weeks a short summary of my progress. Why? Because as you will see, progress is done with small steps. Every two weeks, you will probably notice that the progress isn't that monumental and mountains aren't moved from their original spots.

Over time, progress will build up, results will show, cool things will happen. Because that's how it works: baby steps, compunding, etc.

It applies to shorted time frames as well (a week vs a year).

Progress in the past two weeks

Over the past two weeks, I kickstarted my mentorship programme: I aim to help some motivated mentees to land a job in software engineering, by mentoring them on frontend technologies (React). I do that, becuase in the tech sector, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a gap appeared: most of the companies increased the entry bar for entry level and junior positions, leaving new arrivals in this market unable to land such a job.

And so, the vicious cycle goes on: people can't land a job because they don't have experience, they can't get experience because they can't land a job. A pretty sh***y situation if you ask me.

I had ~20 interviews over the past two weeks in order to determine who is genuinely interested in working in the IT industry (not just for the money), who was independent enough and had some level of basic understanding of programming concepts (so I won't have to explain what are variable, lists, etc). I want to focus on teaching them the skills that will differentiate them in an ocean of junior applicants: code quality, problem solving skills, experience with real-life scenarios. Starting from next week, I'll also kickstart it, as soon as I decide on 2-3 mentees.

Other than that, I updated my mentorship area of the website: I worked a little bit on the backend for the frontend mentorship project, I updated some exercises with better examples ( Lists - searching ).

On my day-to-day-job, as the CTO of Vuuh , we ramped up our recruiting efforts as we prepare for the growth stage of our startup, worked on some interesting systems whose details I can't get into, and of course, the never ending bug fixing. Fun all around!

Next steps

In the next two weeks, I'll focus on my mentorship programme, developing and updating the exercise set beforehand (ideally, there should be one exercise/task per week, but we'll see how it goes). I'd like to pick Amethyst Platform back up, but for now, it is just in the "wishing" phase, depending on how much time I'll have available. I need to be careful, to not push myself too much. Burning out is not fun 😂