Cindy Lam: Following My Formation Journey

Cindy Lam came to Formation two years into her first software engineering role. She was eager to learn more and deepen her knowledge in order to grow her career. When Cindy decided to document her Formation Fellowship journey, we asked her if she’d share a bit about why she’s doing it.

Follow Cindy’s journey:
🐥 Twitter: https://twitter.com/BCStory2
💻 GitHub: https://github.com/ngl4/formation_journey

What was your educational/professional background prior to formation?

I went to the University of Pittsburgh and studied Communication. Truthfully, I majored in it because I wanted to get over the fear of public speaking. During one of my semesters, I learned the basics of coding from one of my Creative Writing professors, but I didn’t explore it beyond that. I graduated in 2017 and landed a job as a Legal Assistant at a law firm. It was there that I met a software engineer who is married to an attorney I worked with. I talked to him about his work and it all sounded so intriguing. I ended up being so interested in the idea of becoming a software engineer that I quit my job so I could commit 100% of my time to pursuing it.

I attended a bootcamp through UPenn in 2018. Post-graduation was a super challenging time. I kept job hunting and worked as a TA at Thinkful for 6 months. I was applying to jobs constantly but received so many rejections. It was so bad that I started to doubt whether or not I even knew how to code. I thought about giving up on being a software engineer. Finally, I started my first softwaree engineering job in January 2020.

What areas of software engineering interest you the most?

l’m interested in product feature development and Mixed Reality.

Why did you decide to start documenting your journey?

I started thinking about this during weeks 3-4 when I passed algo blitz. I realized if I didn’t document what I was learning, I would have a really hard time remembering it later. I was thinking of a way to keep myself on track, and I decided to use GitHub and Twitter to document ie., write down my takeaways on Formation sessions. I’m in the thick of the learning now, so I might as well document it. I also learned from two software engineers, Rahul and Alex from Tech Career Growth, who mentioned the benefits of documentation to help us to remember what we have learned. Documentation helps to learn and relearn a lot of things we learn. You’re explaining to your future self or an audience that is new to the content you’re writing. Writing it down helps you learn how to explain a concept; it’s no longer memorizing at that point, it’s creating deeper knowledge.

Follow Cindy’s journey:

🐥 Twitter: https://twitter.com/BCStory2
💻 GitHub: https://github.com/ngl4/formation_journey

I’ve been documenting since college. I forget quickly, so writing it down helps me remember it better. A lot of times if you do something today you remember about 80-90%. But, the next day, you start to decrease to something like 50% down to 0%. So the quicker you document it, the more you remember it in the moment and the more you gain from it in the long run. In every Formation session, I write down my takeaways and document them.

What do you think about the Formation community so far?

I saw one Fellow, Arthur, helping others out with their algo questions in our community channels. That encouraged me to reach out and talk to Fellows, too. I reached out to congratulate some Fellows on their new job and then asked what advice they’d give those of us still in Formation.

One of the Fellows I reached out to was Mitchell Oliver; he has changed how I move forward in the Formation journey. I’m so thankful I met him. He was so detailed in his response and encouraged me to meet up with Fellows and Mentors outside of sessions to get to know them and learn from them. Since then, I have started to proactively reach out to Mentors and Fellows for group or 1-on-1 chats or sessions. Even though he landed a job at Atlassian, Mitch still meets with me on occasion to walk through Leetcode problems.

I’ve realized through this process that community is the thing I need to treasure the most. While learning more was the initial reason I joined, I’ve taken a step toward nurturing the incredible community I have at my fingertips. It’s only by chance that I met the SWE back when I worked at the law office, and I think it’s such a unique opportunity I have now to meet so many people through the Fellowship.

Looking to network with and learn among SWEs like Cindy? Apply to our Fellowship today!