Careers in Code Student Success Stories: Dakir Thompson

Careers in Code Student Success Stories is a series focused on our coding bootcamp graduates. We’re following their progress in the six months after graduation to learn about projects they’re working on, job placements, and other exciting updates. Our first cohort graduated in August 2019.

Le Moyne College grad Dakir Thompson came to Careers in Code with a degree in general science and a passion for coding that he turned to toward the end of his college career. In fact, he was already diving in before he started the coding bootcamp, landing a job as a software engineer just two days prior to learning he was accepted into the program!

He began his role as C++ Software Engineer at Northeast Information Discovery Inc. Since the end of the bootcamp, however, Dakir was offered the opportunity within the company to be a full-stack web developer on its Web UI Team after his recent annual performance evaluation. The role is flexible, which he loves, and he is working under a more experienced web developer to assist on projects.

“We are an agile/scrum company, so we have a daily standup and sprints that last one or two weeks. We also have sprint planning meetings and sprint retrospectives. My day-to-day consists of me being stretched by coding assignments. I am doing full stack web development work, so most days, I am creating endpoints and manipulating data to display on the front end. Other days I am banging my head trying to figure out how I am supposed to complete this task. so usually there is a lot of Google searches and stack overflow thread reading.”

The tech stack Dakir is working with is the React library and Typescript for the front end, and the back end is in Node and Express. “We use a lot of Web Sockets,” he said, “and some things I had to really get good at quickly were bash and git commands.”

“Careers In Code gave me a solid foundation of full-stack web development. They showed me every part of developing a full-stack web application and showed me some great resources to continue my full-stack journey.”

When we first met Dakir as a new software engineer, he said he wanted to make websites and apps for people who have great ideas, but little funding to support them — ”specifically, people who are low-income, in the hopes that it brings them some side income.” He says it remains a goal for his future.

“I think I would describe it as trying to tackle the problem of economic inequality with the internet and coding. You can’t be redlined from the internet, you can’t be denied or shut out of the internet if you know how to access it and use it. And the internet is here to stay. More and more of our day to day is going to be spent in cyberspace and if you lack the basic skills, you will be left behind.

The more I study African American history and American History, I see that with every industrial revolution, people have been left behind because they were blindsided by the change. I would like to do my part to decrease the number of people whose lives are crushed by this change.

At this point I have only helped one person make a website on Squarespace, but I have been talking with the South West Community Center about teaching a coding class. It is still a goal of mine.”

Want to keep up with Dakir? Follow him over on LinkedIn.