Could coding be the creative career you’ve been looking for?

From Affiliate Marketer to Software Engineer, Pixar Animation Studios

“[Coding] has made me tap into my artistic side. I've always been into painting and drawing but there was a piece of me that knew there was something else I wanted to do. Little did I know that it was coding. I particularly like CSS because I like to design and make things look cool and pretty. It’s just amazing. The possibilities are endless.”

2024 Update: since this article was written back in 2021, Stephanie has continued to grow in her carreer as a Software Engineer. In 2021 she landed an incredible opportunity to work for Pixar Animation Studios as a Software Engineer. She also worked with Nucamp as an Instructor and Career Coach helping other fellow Nucamp graduates as they sought to find career opportunities in the tech industry. 

This is Stephanie Raymos, a Nucamp Full Stack Bootcamp graduate and now a Software Engineer at RL Liquidators.

Stephanie is an artist who enjoys playing guitar, painting, drawing, and more recently building instruments with code.

She had a brush with coding growing up with her father who was a software engineer, which put some paint on the canvas of her budding interests.

As she watched him make HTML websites and create other projects at home, she started to experiment on her own, continuing the coding motif.

She took a beginner HTML class in junior high and loved it, but the idea of coding as a future career only remained a rough sketch in her mind.

By day, Stephanie was an affiliate marketer, barely making ends meet, fitting the mold as a starving artist.

With goals of improving her work-life balance and buying a home, she realized she should trace her pastime of crafting with code and turn it into a career.

Knowing her palette of knowledge was lacking, she tried teaching herself full stack development, but it wasn’t making the cut.

She needed structure, someone to talk to, answer her questions, and to help her through abstract problems, which led her to start looking into bootcamps.

Nucamp's affordability ripped the plaster off of inaccessible education.

She wondered what the drawback was—why is Nucamp so affordable compared to the rest?

But this wasn't a whitewashed opportunity—she could take a bootcamp without disrupting her current job or financial situation.

What it was like taking a Nucamp Bootcamp?

"It was amazing!"

At first, she was a little taken aback by the program because it was a completely new experience for her.

However, after the first Saturday workshop when she learned so much in the interactive environment, she knew it was the right medium.

“Being able to sit back and learn, get an awesome coding exercise, working through exercises, and talking with classmates and the instructor was great. Some classmates and instructors I even still talk to. You really get out of it what you put into it. If you put in more time, you'll get more out of it.”

Describe your job search process.

Her biggest thing was to continue practicing coding in order to keep the information fresh and to help her stay motivated to look for a job.

She would practice interview questions and particularly studied a lot of coding challenges posted on www.leetcode.com.

One of her Nucamp instructors, Mat Mozer, helped her with a specific practice question, which was the perfect primer for when later on she was asked the exact same question in an interview.

After the bootcamp, Stephanie only casually applied for jobs for a few months and took a break from job searching altogether after experiencing some discouragement.

Knowing that persistence was the clear-cut path for shaping her future, she started applying to jobs more seriously and it paid off when she received a job offer 8 months after she graduated.

Now Stephanie urges others not to get too disheartened in the job search process, but to keep applying and not give up.

And the finishing touch of her career portrait is that she is going to be a part-time Nucamp Instructor!

“I’m obsessed with coding. It’s my hobby, my passion AND now my job!”

What advice would you give to someone just starting out?

“If you try to go through this in college, you're going to be in debt, it's going to take a long time. I have two colleagues that are still in debt and they don’t feel like their degree taught them the necessary skills. The bootcamp teaches you the most popular languages, gives you the exact tools you need to get a job. You're coding out real projects.”

What advice do you have for people who have already started the bootcamp and they are just about to finish Bootstrap?

Stephanie noted half of her interviewers were looking for people with React or Node skills, both of which are covered in the Full Stack Bootcamp.

This is where you're going to learn the stuff that's more challenging, but it's going to give you the skills to go far.”