Ian's DBC SF Firecrackers Blog

Reentering the Real World

Home at last...

...three weeks late. Unable to get back to the Twin Cities between weeks 1 and 2 of Phase 3, my time in San Francisco for DBC was the longest I've ever been outside of my hometown. Granted I've lived in Dallas and Chicago for longer, but I found my way back home at least one weekend each month while living there meaning that the twelve weeks combined between the end of Phase 0, the on-site experience itself, and the following career week was three times longer than I had ever been away from home and that pushed me harder than anything else during Phase 3.

Yet now that I am home, I find that all the sudden I miss everyone. For nine weeks from July to September, thirty five of us saw each other every day. Some of us stuck around for the career week, but we've all gone our separate ways now, which is difficult for someone who likes continuity like myself.

During our time together, I watched as people who could barely code turn into strong full stack web developers, people who needed to mature under pressure, and people who had all the pieces and needed the intense focus to put them together. I fall into the last category. Although I could have taught myself Rails, I was missing a lot of the soft skills that need to go along with that knowledge in a professional development environment and DBC filled in those blanks by pushing me into life-like situations that need those skills with coaching to help me along the way. I honestly wish what I learned at DBC I had known years ago as I know I would have been stronger professionally. For instance, I didn't use to ask a lot of questions when given a task. This means I would build what my initial understanding of the task and often optimize it for execution from my own environment and having to perform significant pivoting to meet the client expectations. Now after all the DBC challenges that not only encouraged, but also required a lot of questions, I've settled into the pattern of asking questions about anything from how the code will be used to the environment it will be used in to the architectual pattern it needs to fit into to any number of other things. I genuinely believe this has been one of the things that has held me back in my professional career and now should propel me forward.

Looking ahead, I now seek to reenter the job market. While DBC is well known in the Bay Area, it doesn't seem that very many hiring managers in the Twin Cities have heard of it. While some may look it up when they see it on my resume, it still effectively leaves it up to me to evangelize what DBC stands for succinctly. Such a task seems intimidating and almost feels like trying to summarize thousands of years of human history in 3-4 words, but given the soft skills attained in San Francisco, I feel confident that I am more than up to it. Let's roll!

DBC's 2014 Mule Deer Graduation (Photo by Jessica Tung)
DBC dog tags