After graduating college, I have been trying different methods of getting myself known in the IT community. The first was brushing up my LinkedIn account profile and strengthening my network of connection. Shortly after, I joined Brridge to develop skills in Web Application Development. Afterwards, I attended various job finding workshops that were hosted by my college and spoke with many guests in the IT industry and connected with them on LinkedIn, which included people from Rogers, American Express and Bell. I even got in touch with people from MintBean and even got connected with their company's employees on LinkedIn as well. I also ended up finally setting up my Hashnode blog and started sharing posts about my coding journey.

Even with all the help I got with the hiring coordinators at Centennial College, I still felt like I needed more of a push in order to get more exposure and increase my chances of getting hired. So, I decided to enter my first hackathon at Hack the 6ix !

In my two years of studying software engineering in college, I never attended a hackathon. I have heard word of Android hosting various hackathons in my area, but I did not bother entering them because they would usually conflict with my exam schedule. I did not even know what a hackathon was all about, until recently. I honestly thought all that time spent during the event was to actually hack or decrypt private information within certain time frame. I did not expect hackathons to be about creating a working project at the end.

Given the current state of the world, with the whole COVID-19 pandemic, I found it nice to have an event that I can attend online that is not only a great stepping stone towards my career path, but is also a way for me to test my abilities in a mildly competitive environment. People with varying skill levels, from high to non-existent, were eligible for applying for this hackathon. As a junior developer, this was a perfect opportunity and I am glad that I was able to make the participation cut!

I am very excited for all the things that Hack to 6ix has to offer to us. I am not referring to the prizes. I am looking forward to the various developer workshops HT6 has in store for me, developing my skills as a software engineer and I am especially looking forward to the people that I will be meeting and networking with during the event!

That's all for now, I will expect to blog about my journey shortly after the event concludes!