My learning journey during the ongoing covid-19 pandemic

From mid-March 2020 to date, I have been working from home due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. One of the major positive changes this brought to me was eliminating my daily commute to my workplace. Also, having to work from the comfort of my home provided me a lot of flexibility. I am someone who always makes an effort to learn and grow, so during this pandemic, I was able to explore quite a number of fields and the purpose of this article is to share about a few of them.

Blogging

Some of my most appreciated pieces of writings were from my recruitment series and I wrote almost all of the articles of this series during the pandemic. From reaching out to potential contributors, writing a final draft, and then marketing the content, I learned a lot along the process. Blogging provided me a platform to spread knowledge about the causes I cared about. It gave me the opportunity to experience gratitude from the beneficiaries. And I feel that this is a great achievement for me, to impact positively on someone’s life.

Here’s one LinkedIn message that I received regarding my recruitment series which made me feel extremely overwhelmed and I want to share this with my readers.

Apu, hi!

I hope you are doing well.

I just want to extend my gratitude and appreciation to you.

I am an introvert and I have a hard time interacting with people. That's why after my graduation which was just two months ago, it was pretty nerve-racking for me to ask my seniors about the recruitment process. Then I stumbled upon your blog and it was like finding a pot of gold. Your recruitment stories were so eloquent I felt like I was already a part of most of the interviews. I just want to let you know that you are doing all of us a favor. So, thank you!

Just to let you know, I got an internship offer from X and a couple more but I will be joining as a Trainee Software Engineer at Y from next month. So wish me luck.

Thank you again and I wish you all the best.

Note: I replaced the company names with X and Y.

Contributing to Open Source projects

When I was pursuing my Bachelor’s degree, I found a passion for competitive programming. I was so invested in it that I never made some time to explore various open source programs that were out there. So, my major step into open source contribution was through participating in GirlScript Summer of Code 2020 during the pandemic. Here’s an article I wrote expressing my reasons behind appreciating this program so much. This participation was a huge learning experience for me. Later on, I participated in Developer Circles Open Source Immersion and I came out as one of the local winners of the program. Afterward, I got the opportunity to work as a project maintainer for problem-tutorials repository of LightOJ. And now, with all the learnings and experiences that I’ve gathered, I am maintaining leetcode-solution-curation, which is an open source project.

Upping my Test Automation skillset

During the pandemic, I tried to learn about various components that are needed to create a test automation framework. For this, I utilized the following resources -

• Test Automation University
• Pluralsight courses - Automated Tests in Java with Fluent Interface Using WebDriver Selenium and Building a Java Test Automation Framework from Scratch
• Design Patterns in Test Automation I, Design Patterns in Test Automation II, and Design Patterns in Test Automation III
• Running Selenium Web Tests with GitHub Actions

and some more

After learning all the materials, I created a test automation boilerplate framework. I am still learning and working on this project.