I know it has been a long time since my last post. I was going through the posts and a thought came to my mind, why not resume writing again? Hence, here I am. The last article was about a web magazine, which was stopped in between due to college placement.
In this article, I will be writing about my days during my placement. I don’t know whether you all will like it or not but I felt like writing about it. Hope you all enjoy it in some way.
Online Classes & College
So I don’t remember exactly when all this placement-related stuff began. It was maybe in September 2019, companies were coming a bit late. Most of the students and classmates were freaking out. Whether they will even get the chance to sit for placements during a pandemic or not. I was not freaking out too much, I would say. I had this unfathomable belief in myself that I could at least make a living. So this was not an issue. The issue was whether should I prepare for a job or work for my startup.
So, I had a lot of time on my hands and I thought it was time to upgrade my development skills. Actually, in my second year, I did some small projects using node.js & express.js. I was not very much satisfied with it. The second year was a like roller-coaster for me. I lost many friends, I lost the girl whom I used to love. My health was declining. And just like to add a cherry on top, semester exams were just around the corner. So I did not focus on my dev skills. I was just focusing on passing my exams and holding myself together. The aftermath of all the events, I mentioned just now, was brutal.
Semester results among other things
I just passed my exams, but not with good marks, but it’s OK. I was just thinking it could have been a lot worse, hence it was a win-win situation for me. Anyway, coming back to the present. This was the perfect opportunity for me to level up my skills. So I wanted to become a full-stack developer for a long time. I was already a full-stack developer in Python with the Django framework. But I also wanted to try other stacks.
Now, I have two options in front of me, either I can choose MERN Stack or MEAN Stack. So the only difference between the two words was a letter. Either I had to choose “R” or “A“. So like any other college student, I searched on Google, which one to learn React or Angular. I was a little biased toward technologies developed by Google. On the web, long story short, it said that “to develop some heavy-weight applications, Angular was much more suitable for it.”
Development journey begins
So, I started my learning journey. I started watching tutorials and doing side-by-side coding. The weather was good. It was raining (I am a Pluviophile) so I was able to study for long hours in this weather. And side by side, I also started this personal blog, SEV7EN. I was also managing my other business of affiliate marketing known as ECOMMARKET.
So in ECOMMARKET, 5+ people were working alongside me. In SEV7EN, there were also 5+ people working alongside me. We have talked about it before in the blogs. It was a great time working with so many kinds of people. I learned a lot of things while working with them. I learned a lot about Team Management. We used to have a Daily Stand-Up Meeting (DSM) around 7 PM. It was a short 15-minute conference call. It was very productive, it helped us in tracking things, knowing whether someone was facing any blockers, etc.
Anyway, coming back to my development journey. I was picking up things at a good pace. And in almost 2 months, I was a decent MEAN Stack Developer. But this was not the only thing I was focusing on. My uncle was preparing for AWS Solution Architect Certification. He advised me that I should too prepare for it as the Cloud is the future. I took his advice and got myself on the same course as he did. I was 40% through the course and I started losing interest. The teaching method was kind of boring for me. I dropped it from my priority list. However, the knowledge I gained from it was useful for my MEAN Stack learning. And I was able to deploy an application on AWS using the EC2 service.
College Placement begins
Everything was going on smoothly, it was still the COVID era. The number of cases was increasing day by day at a huge rate. The whole of the world and India were suffering from it, but some places had it even worse.
I live in a state known as West Bengal. During this phase, for a few days, it was hit by a cyclone named AMPHAN. It was horrible. Events like this make me think that no matter how much we excel in technology and strength, there are a few things, where Nature still has the upper hand. Anyway, placements started, and some companies came for placements. Companies about whom I have never even heard. They were offering pennies as a salary. I didn’t even give their prelims round as it felt like an insult.
Companies were coming and going, and my mom and family used to keep on asking me about placements. I used to tell them what was going on, but I could see they were worried a bit.
Finally, I started taking an interest in a few companies, one of them was Persistent. I liked that company, I thought it would be a good place to work. So there was this day of its online exam, it was more focused on subjects from 2nd year and a few from 3rd year. I didn’t expect that, I was anticipating more reasoning and mathematical kind of questions or you may call them Aptitude. I failed that test, wasn’t expecting that to be honest. Mayukh passed the exam(Attaboy!!!).
This was one of the 1st shockers for me of the many which were yet to come.