 This is my first talk on DevCon, this is my second time I'm attending DevCon, first time presenting and English is also not my native language, okay. So I would like to share my story about how I got into tech, how I got here to present here. I'm a former Outreach intern from the past winter and current junior software developer in cancer research. Well I would like to cover what did I learn as an Outreach intern, what I found particularly useful for finding a job, how did it feel to go through a job interview and how it actually felt to start as a fresh junior. So first I would like to introduce myself. I come from the non-tech background, I come from the research in life sciences chemistry. My first contact with programming was when I was making my PhD thesis. I did all my statistics in R, which discouraged me from programming for quite a while. Well then I started family as you can see on the picture. This was me already doing the PhD thesis and then you know to provide a little more context I come from Czech and we historically stay quite a long time with the kids at home after three years for every child. This is something what people out of Czech Republic might not know. So there was when I had the first child I started to think what I'm gonna do because that's a long time and I couldn't work in the lab. So well coding is something what you can do even with a child from the sofa from home. So I started. I picked Python because that's the most easy language I learned that there is. I was piling up courses here's a picture of me and my second child holding the cable of the headphones like an umbilical cord so she was happy. I had some time to calmly do the courses. Well after some time I just felt that I'm piling up courses and not getting anywhere. I was just doing my pet projects and I was thinking where when when I'm gonna do something real like I just didn't see any perspective anymore after after two years of doing courses. Then I learned about how to teach it and that meant going from my pet projects to something what does the working on a software which had community which had its maintainers and which has its own processes. It was finally something real. Well how many of you is familiar with outreach is and how many of you are interns past or current and how many of you are mentors? Good. So everybody quite knows what outreach is. We just like to say that outreach is interns with mentors and mentors from free and open source communities and provides a support for the project. After registration and passing the eligibility check I could see all the projects. There's actually a lot of projects one can easily get lost in it. There are some low level, there are some high level. You can physically pick whatever from programming, documentation, translations. Well and I picked my project was to make a command line interface tool for Pagur. How many of you is familiar with what Pagur is? About half. So Pagur is, well this is the definition which didn't tell me much. I would describe it as something like GitHub but it's a completely open source. It's written in Python and it's operated in the open. That means that you can see all the issues. You can see the pull requests. You can see the discussions on the public IRC channels. You can see the developers talking, discussing the features and approach. You can actually see sometimes that they are not sure about something. Sometimes even the most senior people can struggle and can reach out to ask others for help. This is something very encouraging for somebody who is just a beginner because if you see advanced people asking, then you as a beginner, you're even more encouraged to do so. Well, yeah. Actually this is not what happened in my project. In my project in Pagur everybody was very decent and nicely discussing. Well with this, my project was named CRANK, the common line interface tool. I also wanted to say that I would really provide some travel allowance which allows you to go to some conferences and to meet the people which you just know from the IRC forums which you know just like a nickname. See them in person to talk with them, not only of your projects but of the neighboring projects which are part of the larger community. You can finally put a face into Anonymous nickname on the IRC channel. Well, without Richie, what was the main takeaway is that I developed a strong attitude towards free and open source software which I'm advocating since and also learned that you're expected not only to contribute to your project but with your project you usually influence, you need to adjust maybe some other dependencies, some other libraries. You expect to also contribute to those if you can like for example by report in a bug or even creating a pull request or starting the discussion or offer a code review or verify or test somebody else bug fix. Well the carrot is there because I usually name my testing projects after vegetable. So I just immediately know that it's a testing project if it's some kind of carrot or leak or something like that. Well and then slowly when I was done with out Richie I knew what the next logical step is that was finding a job. I was not sure whether I'm ready to do so already. Well and I would say that the key here which helped me the most was to find my local coding communities in my in my city. Well in my case living in Barcelona there's a lot of different communities. There is a wide range but every programming language has its own meetups there and I picked by ladies with which I had already experienced here from Bruno done by really amazing people and they define themselves as international mentorship group with a focus on helping more women become active participants and leaders in the Python open source community. Well there's a quite different approach between the communities. For example here in Bruno and I think whole Czech Republic it's taken more like courses for beginners which are led by already professionals while in Barcelona and in many other cities it's done either it's a meetups and workshops already for professionals but beginners are also invited but they obviously are the smaller part of the community. They meet once a month and after the meetups and the talks there's some socializing there's usually some free food and you can just make your local network. The other local coding community I was attending was code bar which defines themselves as a non-profit initiative that facilitates the growth of diverse tech community by running regular programming workshops. How it works they meet every second week and I was quite surprised by the approach because they take a little bit differently. It's very much focused on networking that means that we make a circle and everybody introduces it himself or herself and you're supposed to say what you want to learn or what are you able to teach. After that the study groups form usually it's like one coach on one student sometimes two students so it's really personal experience and you can either follow their prepared tutorials or you can come up with your own project and this is really great because you have somebody who is there two hours for you just solving your stuff which is what I never experienced before and I found it really helpful and what is really great on this is that the meetups happen every time in a different tech company so you go to that company you see the surroundings and the people from that company are always involved in the meetup that means that you can get them as coaches and you can network with them you finally end up after several weeks visiting several companies you end up here and there knowing people personally and they also end up knowing you and there is another thing which I found really awesome is that they kind of it's not only one closed community in the city they tends to visit each other from different cities so sometimes we get to visit them from Norway or from another country and that's very enriching because we see how it works in a different city in a different continent that's really great and also when you're traveling and you see that hey in this in this city there is a code bar session maybe I can go there and you have already somebody to talk to to socialize and that was really great these are some pictures from code bar and in this meetups also I found I met a lot of women in different stages of their career from very different backgrounds and I could network with them and I saw and I heard stories which I found very useful well after and the most important thing of this meetups is that they usually have no mailing lists where people are posting job offers whether I was and I was not really sure if I'm already ready to apply but I was reading them just to know what is usually required from a junior from senior well I was just checking the junior ones but like if I'm missing something from the knowledge or from the skills which are usually required and one day I just saw such a job offer which played on my soft spot to the research and I decided that I'll take that little step and I will for me it was big step for me it was a huge leap and I'll try to apply mainly because I don't really believe that it would work I just wanted to start practicing interviews because that is something what you can practice a lot and the bit and the personal experience is the best so I was preparing for my for the worst option that could have happened that was a whiteboard interview I started with kind of questions there could be and so on finally it was not that difficult I went through two turns of interviews one was just a compatibility check with the boss and with the team members where we were just testing if we can if we can communicate if there is the if it works if we are of the similar mindset and the second one was tech interview where I was supposed to solve a simple programming challenge and to create an image and build a container and docker I think and it worked and I wanted my first job as a junior software developer at Institute for Research in biomedicine in Barcelona and in its biomedical genomics lab this is us you can see that there's more women than men and it's a research group dedicated computational study of cancer at the genomic level and I learned that some of them actually quite quite more of my colleagues are either organizers or active participants of some python python but Barcelona meetups that's probably how it got to the mailing list well here I thought that I actually wanted no I had a job that was like this was actually the hardest part of it all like there was very few things I knew and a whole library of things I needed to know and I got yeah there was a who knows how what what do you need for bioinformatics so there is a lot of pandas there's a lot of singularity there is a lot of obscure bioinformatical tools and even we're there file formats which you're supposed to deal with and I was just going to the work and sleeping and I had completely zero personal life this is me every afternoon taking the kids to the playground where they were full of energy and I just couldn't anymore well but after weeks and some months the pieces started slowly to fall in place and I was slowly started to be able to contribute and the good thing I saw happening here was that I brought the good stuff which I learned participating in the open source project to my work and I was able to propose changes and bring the good practices I learned and I started finally to feel useful that's all but we have a little bit of time so if you came here to actually learn something about cancer research and you're disappointed that you didn't learn anything so I prepared this is the project I'm working on it's called cancer genome interpreted I'm working on a second version of it and it's basically open platform designed to support the identification of tumor alterations that drive the disease and detect those that may be of therapeutical relevance how does it work we well somebody somebody in the lab sequences of tumor that provides us a file with a lot of mutations well every tumor has a thousands but many mutations but not all of them are actually relevant major it actually is not more than 9 of 10 of these mutations are of unknown significance and we have tools which which we're able with which we're able to distinguish which of the mutations are drivers that means that they can drive the tumor egenic activity they can start cancer and which of them are just passengers or something between or they are of they are weak predicted and this leads the husband like a personalized drug prescription was a colleague our the cancer genome interpreted is used either by a clinical oncologist or by researchers that just by running this analysis they get a list of of the breath of prescription of drugs which work on those particular mutations which are identified as drivers in that particular tumor and that makes the the decision much faster well in the database we have more than well almost 800 cancer genes and 5600 validated oncogenic mutations there would be much more of them identified if there would be more money in the research usually driven by the government so they are doing what they can and there is more than now there is more than 246 cancer cancer types and if you want to hear some some cancer facts which I found really interesting is that there is about 1000 mutations which happen in a cell every day which is not much and there are some repair mechanisms but if you multiply it by the amount of cells in the body that makes the risk of you getting cancer much higher but it's like it's basically like rolling the dice you never know where the mutation is gonna fall and the more the more times you're rolling the dice the more likely the in the bigger danger you are that the mutations will fall in the bad places like one mutation is not gonna cause anything probably but three already can and three is quite low number to start something something like this well and yeah if you're interested even more so sometimes I learn about even things which I didn't want to learn you can read it yourself which questions do you have am I what I think we're on quite we're on the high highest capacity like our lab is able to have people but I don't know I'm not a hiring manager like we recently hired like three or five people so I think we're on the ceiling now not sure if I heard it properly like if the people from our lab would not be to support this if I if I went to crazy my discourage okay thank you for attention