Looking back, 2020 was an eventful year. I completed my activities as part of the 7th Like Lion cohort, joined the 8th cohort’s management team, and prepared for employment while helping run the program. I briefly succeeded in joining a company as an alternative to military service, but eventually left the company and enlisted. 2020 left me with many regrets, so I want to use this retrospective to look back on my shortcomings and improve from them.

Like Lion

Goals are important.

Ever since I was in middle school, I always liked computers, and I shared IT-related knowledge through Naver blog. As a result, I naturally developed an interest in coding. But that didn’t mean I fell in love with coding in earnest. This is because the C language I first encountered with first was too difficult, and I had no clear goal of wanting to do something with second.

Finding my dream while working as an executive.

For me, Like Lion came at exactly the right time. I learned about the club through a friend I met in my first year of college, and I eventually applied to join the 7th cohort management team. At first, I did not want to take on an organizer role because it meant teaching in front of others. Looking back, however, those management activities helped me a lot. To fulfill the role, I had to study consistently, and that became a driving force that pushed me forward.

My activities in the 7th Like Lion cohort ended successfully in early 2020. Although I did not achieve a notable result in the hackathon, the process of preparing and running classes meant a lot to me. While preparing lesson plans, I began to set backend developer as a concrete goal and realized that coding could be fun rather than merely difficult. From that point on, I seriously started dreaming of becoming a programmer.

Disappointing points

From my experience, programming theories and concepts matter, but the biggest lessons come from building things yourself. That is why I ran the classes in a practice-oriented style instead of relying on slides, and explained the necessary concepts through notes organized in Notion and on the whiteboard. At the time, I thought this would be an efficient learning method, but some members may still have found the classes hard to follow. Because I was studying while preparing the classes, there were many parts I could not prepare thoroughly, and I still feel sorry about that.

Decided to get a job instead of the military.

Motivation

I didn’t want to go to the military. I had just started planning a dream called backend developer, but it was difficult for me to put this aside for a while and go somewhere else. I constantly wanted to move forward, and the way to do that was to get a job in industry. Entering an industrial company not only had the advantage of not having a career break, but also the advantage of being able to receive a salary that was incomparable to military service during the three years of service. I took a leave of absence for the first semester of my third year because I felt I had to find a job no matter what. At the same time, I was training the 8th Like Lion management team and preparing for employment.

Become a job seeker.

I was able to succeed after several months of job hunting preparation. Information needed for employment was usually obtained from Awesome Alternative Military Service and Unauthorized Information Sharing Cafe, and job applications were usually made from Rocket Punch and Industrial Support Military Service Workplace. After seeing the announcements posted here and applying to several companies, one company contacted me and I was able to get a job opportunity.

Succeeded in finding a job.

The task for one week was to build API server based on Flask ​​and create a simple service that manages data and user sessions using postgresql, sqlalchemy, and redis. During that period, I only focused on doing the assignment and put everything else on the back burner. This is because the technology stacks listed in the requirements were unfamiliar to me. In a situation where I had to upload web server, WAS server, and DB server onto the Docker container, there were so many things I didn’t know.

Since I couldn’t use Docker, which I needed to build right away, I couldn’t even use the other technologies. So, I devoted a week to development, excluding sleeping time. As a result, we were able to build API Server that satisfied all requirements. I thought that what I learned during the short entrance exam period was so valuable that I had no regrets even if I failed. Moreover, since I was unable to answer many questions well in the subsequent interview, I was giving half up, thinking I would definitely fail. Contrary to my expectations, I passed the entrance exam.

I almost got automatically disqualified because I didn’t know that the acceptance email was in my spam folder.

Things I gained from corporate life

The company was located in a shared office located in Gangnam. The sight of commuting to work instead of school was new and exciting. I also liked that the company provided a 15-inch MacBook and a Dell monitor. As soon as I joined the company, I did not work and was given adaptation period for about 10 days. During this period, I improved my understanding of the service by performing the task of running the server source code in GitLab on Development Server.

Afterwards, I worked on writing test code and fixed bugs registered in issue. The most memorable work is Slackbot feature improvement, the last work I did at the company. One of the service features was chat, and this feature was used to allow users to ask questions while using the service. After opening a chat, users close the chat when they no longer need to continue asking questions. This method is similar to creating an issue on GitHub and continuing comments below it.

In order to effectively manage these users’ chats (inquiries), the company used Slackbot to send the same message to the Slack chat room. However, this function outputs messages sent by users one by one to Slack, making it difficult to understand the contents at a glance. In other words, it was not very readable when the chat corresponding to one inquiry was separated into several.

So, messages about the same inquiry were posted on GitHub to create Function to show by combining them into one, and I took on the role of resolving this. When I searched for Slack API, there was no function to merge a message. Instead, we solved the problem by using chat.update and search.messages to display the new message by merging it if it corresponds to an existing inquiry, and otherwise create a new message.

Finally, I quit the company.

About a month after I started working at the company, the supervisor quietly called me and my co-worker. They said that there were many people like us in the company who wanted to serve as industrial agents, and that one or two of them were selected, but that it was not us. He said that if you want to continue working at the company, you can do so, but if not, you can leave the company.

The purpose of joining the company may have been to make money, but the main purpose was to replace military service, so this proposal was essentially the same as asking me to leave the company. In the end, I was fired… no, I decided to resign.

The reasons why I had to leave the company at that time were as follows.

  • Insufficient contribution
  • Keep your appointments on time
  • Passion(?)

I don’t remember exactly, but my senior colleague said that startups cannot afford to wait for new employees to grow sufficiently, and that they want talent who can produce performance right away. I have often been pointed out that the process of setting and maintaining period is not carried out well when carrying out certain tasks. I was also told that if I couldn’t achieve results, I had to show passion by staying at the company late and working.

Those words stayed with me as a sharp reminder and became an opportunity to reflect seriously on my shortcomings. The next time I join a company, I want to become someone capable enough to do my part without relying on late nights to prove my effort.

I experienced the bitter taste of life when I left the company, but ironically, the first paycheck deposited that day was very sweet.

The end of this year is military service.

I applied to the company again, but

In the end, the only thing I could do after quitting my job was to find the next company or join the military. Afterwards, I applied to several companies, but I wasn’t able to get into the company I wanted to work for. One company told me that if I liked it, they would give me a TO that would come out next year (2021) and that I should wait while working at the company. They even put up an unusual condition that I could get a job at the same time, but I said no and kicked the opportunity away. (Now that I think about it, I don’t know why I did that…) And I thought I would get hired at another company if I went for an interview, but I politely declined to go to the company because I didn’t think it would be helpful to my career.

Information protection unit support

As I said earlier, the reason I didn’t want to go to the military was career break. Now, for me, who is trying to pursue my dream and move forward, the military was just an ‘obstacle’. No matter how much my parents told me that men should go to the military, I didn’t listen. However, since it was not possible to work in an industrial company, it was not possible to take endless leave of absence from school and stay at home. So I ended up choosing the military, and applied for a position called Information Security Guard that was still related to my major. In addition, I had high expectations after hearing that the unit would be raised to the level of a corps or higher rather than a division.

Self-deployment, despair

Even though my grades were among the top five among intelligence protection soldiers, I was assigned to the 28th Division. When I think about all my friends going to Army Training Command in the second half of the year, my stomach still hurts. During the last week of the second half, I felt like I was almost out of my mind. I kept wondering why I was assigned to a division. As a result, I finally realized it. Don’t gamble. That’s my conclusion. I can’t help but regret that my life is something I pioneer, and that this is what happens when I entrust myself to something like the military where I don’t know where I will end up. The decision to apply to the military was made by me…

Future Goals

Since you are in the military, you can never leave before a certain period of time has passed. That’s the rule of the military. So, the important thing is how much you can accomplish in that time. I want to spend my military life without regrets by making a plan and executing it. Below is a rough goal for that.

  • Steady blogging activities
  • Preparing for coding tests
  • Use of Baekjoon problems, etc.
  • Study software architecture
  • GoF design pattern
  • Java object-oriented design patterns
  • Clean architecture
  • Studying Agile
  • Refactoring
  • Clean code
  • Insufficient Java study
  • Effective Java
  • In addition, read 60 books
  • Diet and exercise for 100 days

Due to the nature of the military, it is not easy to code properly, and I want to be a better developer after being discharged from the military than I am now. Therefore, I decided to study as much as possible in the military to gain the knowledge I needed to have as a developer. And here, my values ​​are revealed: People feel happy only when they lead a life of constant study.

I truly regretted joining the military. Especially after unit deployment. But when I think about it again, when will I have the opportunity to study this much again? It’s a good opportunity to study now, which you wouldn’t have been able to do while going to school or work because you were busy. I have absolutely no intention of lightly throwing away the remaining time of the year. I don’t want to leave behind any regrets as I am responsible for the choices I made.