Alejandra

SmartCoding (SC): What made you interested in a career as a developer? And do you remember what was the first moment when you realized you want to try programming?

Alejandra (A): During my master’s degree in biological science, I worked on the user side with bioinformatics – I was interpreting the results and applying tools to prove my hypothesis. In that time I became very interested in seeing how to develop algorithms to obtain better results for genome annotation and how to display the graphs in a nicer way, so I started to write a small program that arranges arrows as genes using different colors and directions, to represent a gene cluster. Then I became very interested in programming.

SC: Is there any programming language that you think you’re best at?

A: I can understand the logic inside JavaScript and the frameworks like React.

SC: What do you like the most about Full-Stack development? Can you share 3 things?

A: Speaking shortly, as a full-stack you can have a global vision of the project and how everything is connected. You get to learn different technologies and tools and how to implement them. Also, knowing the power of both sides gives you more ideas to develop, because you know what can be done easier in front-end and what is easier or more important to do from back-end.

SC: How much time in the week outside classes do you spend on learning and practicing coding?

A: On average per week, around 25 to 30 hours of reading, doing tutorials and solving the tasks that we have for the project outside the class.

SC: What is your dream job after the course?

A: I would love to work in a company that uses the latest technologies and agile development, a place where women are welcomed and where they receive a chance to start their new careers.

SC: Would you like to develop your own product by using what you’ve learned during the course? If not now, maybe in the future?

A: Yes, I would love to pursue some projects on my own, but still, I have a lot to learn, and maybe with time and more stability, I can come up with good ideas.