From ABAP to Go: a story of an impossible journey - Ilya Kaznacheev - CodersRank

After six years of enterprise development, I have moved from SAP ABAP to Go backend stack. It was a hard, painful but very interesting way. And a really impressive and bright experience, which I want to share:

- what the difference between SAP ABAP and Go stacks and their specific;
- how to prepare yourself for an interview and what to learn first;
- what skills you need to find a great job;
- how to present yourself in the context of the stack shift;
- why the Go is a great target for the move.

Transcript

1. From ABAP to Go a story of an impossible journey
3. background - university physics - courses - admin job - more courses - factory job - ABAP
10. what is the difference between SAP ABAP and Go stacks
11. what’s different - databases - networking - tooling - infrastructure
12. what else? - job interviews - job requirements - development approaches - code quality
13. what’s the same? - programming basics - SQL - some network protocols and standards - architecture skills - soft skills
14. how to prepare yourself for an interview and what to learn first
15. learning - Coursera - Hackerrank/Codewars/other tasks in internet - GitHub
16. job search
17. what am I?
18. no one needs junior developers
19. you're definitely not a junior with six years of experience
20. but it has to be proven
21. interviews
23. CV
27. cover letter
29. so, what's to write?
30. I still don’t know, but... dev.to/benrobertson/the-cover-letter-that-got-me-a-remote-front-end- developer-job-25f9 and answer the questions from the position description. some people do it in CV, but I'm lazy to change it every time.
31. learning through test tasks
32. tests, surveys, other stuff
33. where was I looking for a job? workingnomads.co weworkremotely.com remote.com welovegolang.com remoteok.io remotelist.ru golangprojects.com github.com/kaizensoze/remote-freelance-jobs Slack Telegram LinkedIn Upwork Random companies’ websites
34. what did I have to learn?
35. hard skills - databases (Postgres, Mongo, Redis, Rethink, etc.) - networking (REST, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket) - communication approaches (MQ, APIs), docs (Swagger, Proto, RPC) and observability tools (logs, tracing, monitoring) - a plenty of Go libraries - various development approaches - utils - web apps - microservices - Docker + Compose - K8s - plenty of related technology and standards
36. soft skills - selling yourself - presenting your skills in the right way - suppression of fear & shyness - cultural fit - money negotiation
37. get to work
38. freelance
39. part-time
40. full-time
41. it took over a year of intensive work to find the right position
42. and I realized that only seniors are needed in interesting places, but to be a senior developer != to have N years of experience in technology X
43. what helped ✓ Coursera and self-study ✓ test tasks ✓ go to job interviews. lots of interviews ✓ freelance, even for five bucks ✓ self-presentation ✓ multi-national team experience
44. what didn’t help ✕ deep algorithm study (first chapters of Cracking the Coding Interview should cover 90%) ✕ posting in Telegram, Slack, etc. ✕ job search from the perspective of a middle or semi-gopher ✕ apply on job portal < write an email to HR < get recommendation
45. final results ☺ working with cool people and involvement in interesting projects ☺ visiting conferences and meetups (so far at my own expense), Go community is very active ☺ blogging, there's a lot to talk about now ☺ participating in hackathons ☺ enjoying real remote job possibilities (not a Friday home office) ☺ actively contributing to the community, sharing my experiences
46. contacts kaznacheev.me github.com/ilyakaznacheev dev.to/ilyakaznacheev linkedin.com/in/ilyakaznacheev t.me/ilyakaznacheev t.me/kaznacheev_feed