We sat down, virtually of course, with one of our alumni, Justin Burnett. Community is a big part of the learning experience here at Qwasar. We wanted to give you an idea of the depth and breadth of who is in our alumni community. This interview is a part of ongoing learner interviews of our Qwasar alumni. Read more to learn about the life of a Qwasar alumni!
I was originally born in Iowa and I moved to Las Vegas when I was 15 years old. I joined the army straight out of high school and I was in it for 6 years. I spent 15 months in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011. After I came home and got out of the army, I was just a bartender for a few years. Then, I ended up traveling all around teaching English online as a digital nomad for about 3 years living in Thailand and Spain, which was great. I am so happy I did that when I did, which is ultimately, what led me into coding because of the desire to have that location independence as an option. That ultimately led me to my career in tech.
I think that generally I like to challenge myself or just to do different things. The way I would summarize it is to be ‘consistently inconsistent’ with my life. To me, that means you know never really being complacent and always learning or doing something. Not just being idle, always living. That is just kind of what I think ties the passion and all of that together.
I see myself being in an ideal position of working remotely in a startup that I really believe in, one that the cause is something great. I did research for tech startup of the week once for Nori, which is an innovative company that sells carbon online. They help farmers to place carbon back in the earth and allow people to buy that carbon with their cryptocurrency to offset their carbon footprint, which is just a cool concept. Something along those lines I think would be a great place for me to work in the future. As I am now working in the industry, I see myself being in a more project manager role, especially now seeing all of the moving pieces in real life projects with different teams. It’s kind of fun to me, just constant problem solving, which is something that “Oh okay, what needs to happen? Yeah, I know how to do this.” I think that I could do that and it would be fun to work with a team in that dynamic.
Ideally, I would love to be back into traveling, so next on my list is South America, partially because it helps with the time zones, but I would love to be working remotely in a job in South America. I would also just love the ability to explore in that time off while you are there, so you can go to the mountains for a weekend or a holiday weekend. A holiday weekend in North America is not the same holiday weekend in South America, so you just get a three-day weekend off and not all the people.
I came back to the US in 2019 and I was done teaching and ready to move into something different. I had been teaching for about two years and I was never meant to be a teacher I just found the job. So I was attracted to many coding boot camps and I heard a lot of mixed reviews online. It’s hard to tell what’s an ad and what’s real and I ultimately landed on one that I got matched with and I paid $14,000 for a 14 week course. I did that in February of 2019, and I was supposed to be job ready in 14 weeks and after I had finished my resume was laughable. While searching LinkedIn I found Qwasar and interviewed with Jennifer and she said, “Oh you’d be great for this!”, and I came in when the Oakland campus was still around and immediately it was great. I loved it. I started learning C and it was a really fun challenge and dynamic and I really loved the way that Gaetan and Kwame would really challenge us and they really love to see you struggle and it just became a really fun ritual always overcoming challenges. It was like a family dynamic, you know, which I think important in keeping you going.
I had many struggles. I had a loss in my family and at that during my time studying. The team at Qwasar was flexible with me. They told me to take as much time off as I needed, they were supportive and it was great to have. You know in those difficult times, and then let alone the pandemic, which I think we all had some shared trauma going through. It was great to have that consistency, even sometimes just on the weekly meetups was just great to see everyone's face and see how they were doing. Sometimes when you were struggling, it was nice to see other people succeeding on their projects. Everyone is really supportive of each other.
The biggest thing was learning that you can learn any of these technologies, you really can. At first it just seems so overwhelming and so challenging, even if you pull up the documentation for anything and you read it, you’re like “What?!” and you look at it and later it just makes sense and that’s just how it works. You just have to keep staring at it and keep trying it and keep doing it, but eventually you are going to get it. It is inevitable.
At first, making a function to print 1-5 would take me a long time and when I actually did it, it was like “Wow!”, but now I could do that in my head and in almost any language I have worked with just like that. However, it is hard to see that because now it does not seem like that was a big thing. It is a hard concept; people look at two lines of code and are like “yeah, I’m out”. It just takes persistence.
I think doing printF was a big one for me. It was kind of a milestone project for me. The first one that I went into in the C language. It had a lot of moving parts. The other ones I had done previously had been simple, only reverse this string, or make these capital letters, or you know just one little simple task in a function. This was one that I had to divide it up and make different files. Which was intimidating because it’s C. It took me a few weeks and making little bits of progress along the way and it ended up being a lot of math because of converting the numbers into the proper forms. However, Once I completed the project, it really gave me a good understanding of memory allocation and memory leaking and just really what’s going on in the computer. The insight gave me a lot more confidence going forward working with higher-level languages. I thought, “Wow, I can program what the computer is inputting and help what it sees and do that in C which I had to go to the big textbook like in C. This programming language existed before the internet!
To build off what I said before about the functions being easier now, The rewarding aspect of coding is that every day is a huge success. These are difficult concepts to learn at first. Every time that you overcome something, it is a big click. They are so rewarding. It is like a helix, you get to the brink and you get a wealth of understanding each time you get past those milestones, the dam really breaks. It feels good because you might spend weeks stuck on something that is really challenging you, but when you get it, it's just kind of like, “Ohhhhhh!”, and as much as a struggle as it can be, it's those little hits of dopamine that are just really nice and it keeps you going. It is kind of like throwing darts. You throw and each one of those bullseyes is a big success. In addition, you know completing a project is just as big of a success as it was to getting a certain aspect of that project working. It might have even been a bigger challenge getting those things working than it would be to actually finish the project. It is a journey with many milestones.
I think that it really depends on what you are doing. If you’re using the wrong technology for what you’re trying to do, you’re just going to have a bad day and you’re not going to like it at all. But in a nutshell I would, especially after learning C, Python and Ruby are my favorites, which are powered by C. It feels like I’m just doing C but cheating. Having that understanding of C, I can look at any Python and Ruby code and just be like “Oh it’s just like doing this.”, without all the little bits of code and moving pieces required by C. The higher-level languages do it for you. Which is different with C, it’s like nothing does anything unless you tell it to do something. With Python and Ruby, you just tell the computer, “Do this.” and literally, it’s done. So you know it gets really fun to be able to do that with the knowledge of what’s under the hood.
It’s kind of one of those things you get kind of frustrated with because they can be really challenging and you’re like “I know you don’t even do this in a job”. You talk to anybody, and they will tell you that they don’t use these in a job. I personally do not use hardly any of the data structures in my job. I might reference it vaguely. As far as I know, that is how it goes. However, it is kind of like learning your ABC’s before spelling. If you can understand how the data structures work, you are going to understand how the program is structured. Therefore, you know learning it is important and it is something in my opinion that’s like math. Learning it with a group, is so much easier. Having that support, or just somebody else with a different perspective, because there is no one way to do anything in software development. There are infinite ways to do anything, which is one of the cool things that makes creativity and technicality meet together.
You can do it! You can. You’re going to face it a million times where you’re going to be like “Oh, I don’t get this, other people are so much better than me, they started after me and they know more”. You are going to face imposter syndrome every time, but once you are there and you are in a job, you’ll feel so accomplished! It is challenging, but it is not that hard and you can learn it. You just have to keep going. It sounds cliché but it is the truth.
I had a much longer journey than most, I started with my decision in February of 2019 and I got hired as a Software Test Engineer for Dish Network in April of 2021, so that’s a good two years of constant rejection. I cannot tell you how many cover letters and things I, hundreds of them, almost 80% of them remain unread. I can’t tell you how many recruiters just stopped talking to me or just didn’t call me back for no reason.
I think we rather covered it all. You know, I think one of my biggest things about Qwasar is that despite the fact that you can learn any of this stuff online and there are so many workshops and programs offered on the internet, they make the experience very personal. They have built the platform themselves, and put all of that time and effort and passion into it, and you can see it. They will work with you every step of the way and it differs from the normal turn and churn as the high priced coding boot camps. You join the team and we’re doing this until you get a job, whatever it takes, what strategy you’re going to take, what niche are you looking at, where are you at. It is not like “This is how you do it”, it’s “What do you want to do? We’ll help you”. I really appreciate that. I do not think I could have done it without it. I would have given up long ago with just the coding boot camp, found some other thing, and just been out a lot of money.
We are thankful for Justin's time in developing this interview and sharing his insights and journey. We are looking forward to sharing more alumni interviews in the upcoming months.