Everything you want to know about the LEAP Program

I, and I'm sure everyone else in my cohort, have gotten a ton of requests from total strangers asking about the LEAP program at Microsoft. Now that there's one week left, I feel like I should meet that demand by writing up another blog about it.

I first heard about LEAP through the Coding Dojo mailing list. I applied mostly because the application process seemed pretty straightforward and I wanted to see what would happen. At worst, I would get some practice whiteboarding out of it. Back then I was working at Ergometrics, where I had been implementing AWS and website features for the company, which offers vocational aptitude testing for firefighters, police officers, and other professions with clients all across the US. Working as a junior developer was even better than I had expected and Coding Dojo had done a great job preparing me for it.

When I got invited to interview, I was really surprised, but I decided to go ahead with it anyway.

My first interview was with a 15 year veteran PM who had worked on Bing. He asked me about my professional history and had me do two simple whiteboard questions, which I had encountered before both at the Dojo and in the book Cracking the Coding Interview. It was my first whiteboard interview ever, and it went pretty badly.

One thing I wish I had kept in mind was that if you aren't sure about the exact syntax of the coding language you were working in, you can always just write it in pseudocode first to show you know what you're doing.

My second interview was with the program's founder, Wil Adams, who asked me a lot of creative, off-the-wall questions about technology and programming. It was really interesting, and it made me consider what good I thought that technology could do for society. His whiteboard question was interesting, and I really learned a lot working through it with him. One thing I wish I had considered more thoroughly before this interview was what kind of a career I wanted at Microsoft, and what kind of a company Microsoft is.

Honestly, getting chosen baffled me and I still wonder how they came to the decision to pick me. Of course I would have loved to work for Microsoft, but I had never once considered myself as qualified to work there. As a Coding Dojo grad, the only thing that I had learned was web development - CRUD, MVC, etc. I figured I would spend the rest of my 20's working at startups and trying to avoid Wordpress gigs.

I was considering going back and studying Computer Science... From a bachelor's level at University of Potsdam while working at one of Berlin's tech startups like Blacklane. Now thanks to LEAP, I feel like I've learned enough that I might be able to actually start studying CS at the Master's level with UW's Professional Master's in Computer Science.

The classroom portion of LEAP seemed like it was self-consciously modeled on the bootcamp learning model, in that it was made up of lots of mini-projects. One thing I wish I had done before this was getting more familiar with working using Windows 10, Visual Studio, Azure, and C#. I had always worked with OSX or Linux before, so it was a bit of an adjustment before I got used to it, but now I can really say that I love working with Visual Studio and I will probably buy a Windows machine for my own private use.

I got placed on a team on Azure, where I've been working on internal tools, taking part in daily scrum stand-up, and getting a lot of face-time with senior engineers at Microsoft.

It's really an honor that I got chosen to be on Sparta team, which gets its name from the fact that it manages all traffic entering Azure and creates a system for categorizing the creation and use of Azure resources. If I'm being optimistic about my contribution, I've written an app which will automate a process that updates across all of Azure. Azure generates two petabytes of logs EVERY DAY, so just imagine how big of a product that is.

Now, as we're winding down, I can say that I got the opportunity to meet a lot of really talented people, I was held to a much higher standard in coding than ever before, and I think that I will be able to make a much bigger contribution to the tech industry as a result of what I learned in this program. I would recommend LEAP to anyone interested in coding, even someone with a few years of experience. Microsoft is a very exciting place to be right now, producing a lot of great products. I think it was really generous of them to give fresh bootcamp grads an opportunity like this.

They're currently interviewing applicants for cohort 4!

https://www.industryexplorers.com/application.html