Coming from Nîmes in the south of France, Jullian Mercier has spent the past 6 months interning as an iOS developer with Guaraná. He came to Montreal to join us in July excited to visit the country and explore while also experiencing a new work opportunity in iOS development.
Prior to moving to Canada, Jullian completed a Masters degree in International Business and worked as a purchasing agent before pursuing his passion for programming. He followed an online coding program in France on a platform called Open Classrooms, receiving a diploma in iOS development. Even when he worked in the business field, programming remained a passion of his in the back of his mind, “When I was a teenager I would build my own websites and use HTML, CSS on basic stuff. It wasn’t really programming but it was still some experience with computers building some products and websites on my own from scratch.” One of his favourite resources is Ray Wenderlich, a website for tutorials and online courses to help build on iOS development skills.
Sadly, his internship is rapidly coming to an end but it was an experience Jullian will never forget. He enjoyed Guaraná‘s positive mindset, and the flexibility and independence the internship provided him. “I was given apps to build from scratch. It was an enriching experience. It was good for me, for my experience, for my skills, for my knowledge. I’ve learned so much here just by building apps and having the help from the other developers in the company. I liked very much the mindset here. We are always helping each other, there is no competition between the developers. To me, this was a great experience. Here, I got the chance to not only build small features for apps but build whole apps from scratch, from the ground up.”
With only a few days left of his internship, Jullian left with some great advice for future iOS developers, “From my experience, for people who want to go into app development, they have to believe in themselves. Don’t think that ‘it’s not for me, it’s too complicated to follow, I don’t have a computer science degree’ or ‘I don’t have the background’. If you find it interesting and you are passionate about it, just go, just start to write your first line of code. Start experimenting with stuff. Try, fail and try again. The small victories are the things that will make you a developer. Small successes, just going step by step. But of course, you have to go with it, don’t think, just go. Just write. It’s very technical. You can see what you build. So you can just try and try again. You can do and redo until you understand it. You have to be passionate about it. You can’t go into development if you’re not 100% sure you love it and you’re going to want to write code for the rest of your life.”
