William King Web Developer

The Past

Having grown up in sunny Arizona for most of my life, I decided to move to the east coast in the spring of 2012. I was working in sales and hospitality for a few years before I got into coding. Working as a mixology/cocktail bar consultant on a part time basis, I had a lot of free time on my hands. That is when I started taking my hobby of coding more seriously and actually started thinking about making it a career. Coding very quickly became a huge part of my life and I soon noticed that I had a knack for building things and solving problems.

After about three years of learning on my own, I started researching bootcamps, online training programs, and even four year degree programs. After a long vetting process I settled on Rutgers Coding Bootcamp. I chose RCB because it was six months not three, it was full-stack, and I felt it was less risky being sponsored by a "brick and mortar" university with a prestigious history. Being a career changer I knew I had to work harder than everyone else. It was the most difficult six months of my life but all that hard work paid off. In fact after the program was finished I was one of three in a class of thirty asked to apply as a T/A for upcoming cohorts. You could only apply if you were asked and it was a difficult hiring process consisting of three interviews. I went from paying for a program with most of my savings, to getting paid to now help teach it. I found teaching others only helped shore up my weaknesses and build on my strengths.

Work History and What I'm up to Now

After being a T/A for a short time I took a job in Illinois working at Yash Technologies contracting for John Deere. The job intrigued me because they had a graduate training program with three months of Java training. A language I always wanted to learn. Two months into the program the instructor noticed my small Java assignments had considerably more UI/UX than the other students and I was asked to teach the class HTML/CSS/Javascript basics for one week. Shortly after that, I was pulled out of class early and put on a project working on an application for John Deere. I was working in React/Node/HTML/SASS at the enterprise level and learning so much. After about a year at Yash, I moved back to NY/NJ. Looking for another opportunity, my old bootcamp reached out to me and presented me with an opportunity to join a company sponsored Java Microservices bootcamp. This one was three months long and very intense. Less than 50% made it through and was offered a position at Cognizant. Since September 2019 i've been working with Cognizant and I am very happy there. At this time of writing I've been put on a rather large ecommerce project for a Fortune 100 company. In parallel to the project I am working on getting certified as a cloud engineer. My long term goal is to be a cloud architect.