Code Labs Interview with Graduate, Anthony Rodrigez

Helping Anthony become the first member of his family to enter the engineering industry.

August 5, 2024

We caught up with Anthony Rodrigez, participant and grad of our Full-Stack Web Developer program¹ to hear his take on the program, the challenges and successes faced, and where he’s at post-graduation. During our reflection, we couldn’t help but notice his excitement for the software engineering industry and the positive mindset and hardworking attitude he carried throughout completing the program.

This is a two-part blog series where our readers get a chance to hear from Anthony in part one of the series. Part two is coming soon and we're excited to sit down with Ben Pomerenke,² Founder and Director of Engineering at WareHQ Labs³ and learn more about how he leads their development team. Be on the lookout for part two, coming soon!

Anthony's story is unique and exciting and we are honored to play a part in helping him tell it. Keep reading to learn more about his passion for programming, what the program was like for him, where he is post-graduation, and more!

Q & A with Anthony

Codefi: Congrats, Anthony, on graduating from the Full-Stack Web Developer program, and thanks for taking the time to tell us more about you and your experience. We’ll dive right in. What was life like before completing the program?
Anthony Rodrigez: I’m originally from Michigan and grew up there for the first eight years of my life. We traveled around the USA before living in Brazil for four years and eventually returned to the USA. At that point, my mother fell ill and I ended up attending multiple high schools due to moving. After high school, I served in the Marine Corps as a CBRN-D and moved into a career as a professional illustrator. When the pandemic hit I had to transition to construction to pay the bills before landing at Codefi! My father is Mexican and my mother is Brazilian, and I'm the first member of my family to work in engineering.

What was a day in the life of a program participant? What was the time commitment?
I worked as full-time [on the program] as I could, but I was also running my own business in construction and working as a handyman. I could work a few weeks very intensely and then take a week or two to study and code very intensely. My situation was rather unique. On the work days, I would listen to the coding instructional videos/lectures for both this program and others that I took on to get an idea of what was coming up as well as to broaden my knowledge base. On the coding days, I would start around 9-10 in the morning and work three 3-hour or longer intervals of coding, usually putting in 8-12 hours a day. Some days less, some more. I'm a very driven and motivated person and don’t like doing things halfway and coding is also incredibly interesting for me, it was a very exciting time!

What challenges did you face when it came to the course offerings?
The challenges I faced were like the ones that many face, learning the fundamentals in terms of what each piece of code does and functions was a bit of a mystery for a while. The quick speed at which we moved through the content was also a little surprising at times but I adjusted after a month or so. Getting Ruby and Rails working on a Windows machine was a fun experience that challenged us and the code coaches alike! The additional evenings definitely tuckered me out for the first few months but adjusted to that as well.

What excited you most about enrolling in the program?
The chance to learn and collaborate with others excited me a lot! I had been working independently for the previous six or so odd years and not being able to bounce ideas off someone or share in a moment of success or excitement can be deflating. The opportunity to learn from subject matter experts as well and having opportunities to have direct conversations was very exciting.

What was it like to have support and mentorship from the Code Labs team?
Having the experience of the code coaches and mentors on hand was invaluable. They were always able to help us solve problems or troubleshoot bugs or strange errors. They also were able to admit when they didn’t understand or have context and would jump in and work the problem with us. Being able to observe their process of resolving an issue was a great learning experience and showed me what this career is truly about.

What was most beneficial about the employer capstone projects?
For the Employer Capstone Project, my team and I had the opportunity to work for the company I now work for—WareHQ Labs. We were given the challenge of working on a Continuous Improvement/Continuous Development (CICD) Pipeline Visualizer. Essentially as new features are added the app is run through a process that runs tests to confirm there are no significant errors with the code. This can include Unit Tests, End to End Tests, and other custom tests before providing options to deploy to different environments. The experience was very helpful for team awareness especially when merging and deploying to the main branch to have the steps visualized and that’s where we came in! There’s a lot more to it but I wanted to give readers an idea of why it’s valuable.

We also took on the challenge of a new tech stack of Vue, NodeJS/Express, and MongoDB. We do not use Mongo but DynamoDB which is very similar but still different from Mongo. We took this on so that future maintenance and updating would be easy to read and add to for the team. The Bitbucket CICD Visualizer is still in use in the office today and if it’s not running our lead quickly turns it on! Learning the new stack, fetching and providing data quickly from the bitbucket API, and then getting it to the front end within a narrow time window was a fun and meaningful challenge.

How did the paid work experience prepare you for the workforce?
The paid work experience was also a surprise with WHQL. It was a different universe of experience. WareHQ is still in the early stages of development, so on the technical side, the software engineers are expected to have some familiarity with the entire tech stack. For me, this meant taking on learning the basics of AWS which has many different tools and systems, Terraform (architecture as code), and Quasar (similar to bootstrap), and deepening my knowledge of Vue, JS/TS, NodeJS/Express and many more technologies used through the application. This also was my first encounter with N-Tier systems or systems with many layers of abstraction as well as asynchronous calls through many layers for the Front End, API, Backend, and Data Bases. Compared to the basic 3-Tier system we learned during the program: a Front End, API, and Backend/DB. Being able to track and follow data as it is transformed and passed through all of those layers was very challenging at first but by the end, I started to get my feet under me.

There was also the task of learning the ins and outs of the warehousing industry. Ben Pomenrenke, Software Engineer and Technical Leader at WHQ, fully understood that I was drinking from the fire hose. The way the team is structured gave me ample opportunities to contribute and grow my knowledge and understanding. One of the mechanisms the team utilizes is pair programming. This is where each desk is set up with two of everything and software engineers work side by side to work through a story/task. This collaboration helped bring me up to speed on the code base and the business.

I'm incredibly grateful to the entire team for their assistance, always taking the time to explain and collaborate, and their endless patience. I often joke that I feel like Forky from Toy Story 4 - “What’s a Computer?” Ultimately at the end of the paid work experience (PWE), I was given the opportunity to interview and was offered a JR SWE position!

What has life been like post-Code Labs?
At the end of the PWE, I immediately transitioned into my role at WHQ. The adventure continued with more onboarding and HR. It’s been a lot of fun growing my skill set into some of the LLM and Python tools we have implemented around it. Having the added work-life balance has been a big benefit as well.

What part of the program has had the most impact on your life?
The program opened my eyes to a real challenge and creative problem I could sink my teeth into. I’ve done some challenging things and this has certainly been one of the most challenging and meaningful. It made the career seem possible whereas before in many aspects of my life, I was told that career options would have been impossible due to a lack of education or other factors.

What’s a day in the life of a software engineer?
Most days follow a similar pattern. Usually, we start the day somewhat independently taking care of tasks, reading up on tech news or other interesting technologies, or working on the previous day's story/coding card. After that is a 10-15 min morning standup where we review what everyone is doing in brief and success or blockers are called out. After that, we return and work on whatever story/coding cards there are, or code reviews.

We implement pair programming as mentioned previously so if there is nothing in review and there are three stories in flight then we jump in and collaboratively code with someone. During the day sometimes our QA will find a bug so we jump in to troubleshoot or identify what or why something is happening. Sometimes this leads to impromptu bug fixes or others are just relaying information and context that QA may not have been aware of.

Other weekly meetings may happen such as story refinement or retrospectives where the team comes together to discuss what we are doing well and what can be improved. We also have outside-of-work team activities where we will get together for a special event and another where we will get together for charitable work. I'm still excited every day to come in and be a part of this team to solve problems for the people I’ve met on the ground and in the offices at warehouses.

What advice would you give to a future applicant?
Your success in this field is determined by your ability to be stubborn. As Marcus Aurelius says “The Obstacle is the way.” There will be days that you feel on top of the hill, and days where you feel like you don’t know anything. Just don’t quit, take a break, make some tea, go for a 10-minute walk, and come back to it.

Problem-solving the errors and problems is the job. At first, it is tough to see a wall of red text over and over. In most normal situations it means something is very wrong. But with software engineering, it is just another source of information and guidance. Make it your friend!

When you’re at the end of your capability, ask for help, this is not weakness but strength. It can be good to go it alone and find the limit of your capabilities but we all need help and guidance and your peers and mentors are there to help you by working the problem together, or showing you the path you may not have been able to see. Alone you can go fast but together we can go far. If you ever need help you can always reach out to me as well!

What would you say to a student on the fence about applying for the Code Labs program?
JUST DO IT! I joke but really, coding gets a bad rep for being math-heavy and while there are layers of abstraction and complexity I’ll try to change the paradigm by asking, are you a creative problem solver? Are you stubborn enough to hold on to a problem until you can figure it out alone or with a teammate? Do you love technology? Then this job is for you!

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Stay tuned for part two of this success story for a chance to hear from Ben and the rest of the WareHQ Labs team.

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