Self-learning

Pre-copium 🫁

During my first co-op search in 1B, landing an internship — let alone a single interview — felt borderline impossible.

For context, I’m enrolled in a co-op program at Waterloo, where students alternate between study and work terms, completing up to 6 internships by graduation. At the time, my coding experience was limited to basic Python, C, and ✨ Racket ✨ (a very unpopular language taught in Waterloo’s first-year CS course).

At first, I was initially hoping for some sort of SWE job, but by April, I was applying to quite literally anything... Nonetheless, I was fortunate enough to secure a last-minute, non-technical internship later in May.

Looking back, my struggles boiled down to a few key things:

1. I was a first-year student with no relevant work experience, stuck in the classic chicken-and-egg problem, where you need experience to land a job, but you need a job to gain experience.

2. I had no personal projects to showcase my skills.

3. I didn’t start coding at the age of 5 and had no Google or NASA internships under my belt. 😔💔

Jokes aside, after spending a whole term applying to internships while juggling assignments and exams, I set out to use my free time over the summer to pick up some real technical skills, in hopes it would make my next job search a little easier.

After some thought, I decided to pursue learning full-stack development, as it seemed like a foundational skill worth learning and one of the most accessible paths into the SWE industry.

Adjusting to my learning style ⛳

The common advice for learning any technical skill is to just "build projects". However, I personally find that diving into projects without any foundational knowledge isn't the most effective approach for my learning style, and I also wanted to avoid the classic trap of tutorial hell.

Instead, I first looked for a structured course that I could study off of. After some research and Reddit browsing, I landed on Full Stack Open, a free online course by the University of Helsinki, covering essentials like React and REST APIs.

Learning full-stack development 📚

From mid-June to late-July, I spent about 2 hours per day working through 7 sections of the course:

• Part 0 - Fundamentals of web apps (HTTP requests)
• Part 1 - Introduction to React (components, props, useState)
• Part 2 - Communicating with a server (forms, promises, useEffect)
• Part 3 - Programming a server with NodeJS and Express (REST APIs, MongoDB)
• Part 4 - Testing Express servers, user administration (JWT)
• Part 5 - Testing React apps (Cypress)
• Part 6 - Advanced state management (Redux)
• Part 7 - React router and custom hooks (routing, styling)

Overall, I think the course did a great job of covering the fundamentals, with hands-on exercises that progressively built mini-projects.

Building a project 🏗️

To apply what I learned, I wanted to build a full-stack project from scratch, as I firmly believe the best way to learn is by getting stuck, breaking things, and problem solving.

After a month of grinding, I designed, developed, and deployed Stockle, a stock-themed version of the viral Wordle game.

• Backend:
  • Built a Node.js and Express API for user authentication using JWT
  • Wrote a Python script to fetch stock data from the Yahoo Finance API to populate the MongoDB database
• Frontend
  • Built the frontend with React, and used Material UI and Chart.js for UI components and interactive charts
  • Implemented Redux for global state management, which required careful design decisionss
• Infrastructure
  • Learned about Docker and used Docker Compose to manage both the frontend and backend
  • Deployed the frontend using Vercel and the backend using AWS ECS/EC2

Leveraging online resources 🤖

While building Stockle, I relied heavily on the following resources to help me debug and learn unfamiliar topics:

• ChatGPT (MVP)
• Github Copilot (free for students with Github Education)
• Youtube
• Stack Overflow

Landing an internship 📍

For my next internship search, I slapped Stockle onto my resume, which greatly improved my interview rate success and became a great talking point during interviews, demonstrating my ability to navigate the entire development process — from design to deployment.

Overall, this experience reinforced a lingering idea that I had in my head, in that: your school and program don't matter as much as you might think.

Closing thoughts 💭

Overall, building Stockle was a super rewarding experience for me, as it helped me realize how much I enjoyed the process of transforming an idea into a functional piece of software.

Moving forward, I hope to continue self-learning new skills, instead of solely relying on university courses to teach me the things I want to learn. While some courses are great, at the end of the day, I believe that taking the initiative to learn things you’re genuinely interested in — whether through design teams, internships, or projects — is just as important.

Anyways, that's all from me! 🙂