It seems many people wonder, how I went abroad in 2017 as a native Chinese villager...
I feel this question funny, how I went abroad? Of course, after tech interview!
It was during my job searching period in 2017 after I just left a contractor job and stayed in my rent apartment looking for another job.
I was positive enough at that time, young and energitic, also diligent enough to use all foreign tools to set up coding stuff to work well.
What I prepared to make myself to stand out maybe from all of them?
Because I used AWS in the previous contractor job, my English is good enough, I helped with issues in AWS cloud, including technical support feedback to AWS foreign speakers to deal with billing issues.
I published many English content videos speaking of myself on Youtube, I introduced myself in English, also my daily hardships looking for a job in Shanghai, during those months, every time I got an f2f interview invitation, it was not easy for me to go from where I resided near Microsoft in Minhang district to other areas in Shanghai, I was really dumb at dealing with renting since I was too fresh in Shanghai still staying in one place not moving, the key to saving time working in other cities is moving...
I registered AWS and had EC2 machine, at that time, amazon has a free tier plan for 12 month using EC2 to host developer's websites for free, I set up an Umbraco website. The Umbraco CMS is a very well known DotNet open source CMS system which has rich features and is a good bootstraper for personal website, and it looks stunning, it is developed by a European community, which I suspect had left the European interviewee better impression...
I had my own English wordpress blog for a long time. When I started practising English writing and Speaking, I also picked Wordpress as my English blogging parterner... I wrote many blogs while my Chinese blog is still being maintained to record my technical challenges and new discoveries that I think of. I am looking to catch up cuz I know in this career, there are always numerous challenges to come, new things to learn.
At first, the company sent me email of a coding scenario, about car brands and speed etc. I was asked to abstract the inheritance chain to create a program to calculate the results based on some given spec, it actually took much time for the interview process, I finished the little coding project on a Saturday, and sent my code to the interviewer...
My Coding still is not bad, I passed the coding quizz, and then I was asked to go to another city for a f2f interview. The whole process took the whole afternoon, I still remember, I went there, and it was also a weekend, only the interviewer was in the office, I met with the CTO, and the interviewer, the f2f interview was about more coding stuff, about SQL server queries, etc, joined tables complex queries in the database. Coding concepts such as DDD, CQRS, etc. And my answers were not bad, I had rich knowlege about software engineering etc.
For the whole afternoon, I sat with the interviewer, he spoke English, and I also spoke English, we got along not bad, he is a really nice man. He told me a lot about things that happen in abroad.
I have my github account, where I somehow kept some programs that I wrote in the Past, the Windows form application written in more or less standard MVP patten, showing my coding understandings, and some other projects that I wrote, I am a fan of Coding, I wrote articles quite a lot. In different languages.
So, my English communication is good enough to bear casual chats. When I was in Microsoft, when most people are simply using English in email communications, I already tried to use English to describe my surroundings and kept learning new words to support my oral English...
I was already a full stack developer who had rich Experience and knowledge from either English books and practical job projects. I should say thanks to some people that I met with, they told me about GITHUB, about programming books, via which I always loved to expand my thinking to write real working pieces to conquer more and more unknown.
I was more or less smart enough to go for a certain direction specifically. I had working experience in Microsoft and my ex-job which both allowed me to build things from raw code, they don't restrict on libraries, and I just build those projects without some libraries, lucky enough to have been given enough time to work on the projects with a not very tight deadline, and I built those projects and shipped on time with enough testing and very good documentation...
Styling? I entered the gate from building the very busy projects for internet Unicom activies. And every time I meet with a new English word, I look it up to understand the whole phrase. And every time I think of JS coding problems, I code it in a browser terminal to try it out, that's how I got better at coding.
I specially searched books on programming issues, about what questions are the most frequently asked ones. And I found a book called Programming Interview Exposed, which told me a lot about common questions that really need to learn, algorithms like recursion and traversal etc. And I wrote many articles about my experience joining an interview in PWC, how I answered the questions, as well as algorithms try-outs of traversal infix, postfix,prefix... I subscribed to an author "Primary Objects", seems her name is Kurry Becker similar... I got really interested in common algorithms and spent much time looking into them...
I also had an wechat public account at that time because it was very popular to post there, I also sent some English articles which I wrote till 12 o`clock at night for my front end project experience which I resolved every compex styling issues for a cloud platform...
How diligent I was to be this productive...
So my brother said I was the Best English speaker and we got along for almost 5 months...
And this English article took maybe 1 hour or so to write.... If you are merely a job coder, coding is deadful, are you able to find the solutions? I doubt...
Last the laaaaast, I look good……
A man with a good taste knows to make himself clean and tidy, as well as his code!