Adedapo Ajuwon
HackerNoon.com
Published in
4 min readJul 21, 2017

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I know HTML,CSS and JS, Now what’s next?

I’m often asked this question, whenever I’m done training young web developers, so, what’s NEXT?. If you are expecting a kind of 2017 career path on what to learn next, I’m afraid, I can’t tell you that here.

Please read on, and at the end of the article you will understand why I wont need to force some programming mantra down your throat.

TL;DR

My advice for junior dev leaving Bootcamp

Brand yourself

Get yourself online, tell people you are a developer, however, lizard brain will tell you that you ain’t fully formed yet, but fake it, till you make it.

Belong to a community .

Engage with top developers in your niche,find him, read his codebase on github, stuck him on social media let him feel you.

Add value, job, money and fame will chase you.

Narrow down your skill.

Commit to learning all the time and fast

Build your confidence

Full article… so let’s dive in, are you ready?

Now you are done learning the basics of HTML,CSS and JAVASCRIPT, you can create some cool stuff with your skills, this post will tell you what’s NEXT and how you can speed up your career.

If you are reading this, I believe you are taking programming full time career, because

WHAT YOU CANT DO FOR THE NEXT 5 YEARS, I’LL ADVICE YOU TO STOP AND THINK TWICE

Brand yourself.

It’s important to have a personal homepage for yourself highlighting your skills, a free github page is enough, if you don’t have enough cash to purchase a hosting plan. Tell the world that little you know, yes! That little stuff, state it there.

Since you are in a continuous state of learning, you can always update.

Go ahead and change all your social media account bio to something that will tell people what you do, its part of branding dear. Most importantly its imperative to have the following social media account

twitter

facebook

github

linkedIN

stackOverflow

meetup

Belong to a community

No developer is an island, don’t just belong but try and be an active member, follow top developers in your niche on social media, let them feel your presence, make your voice heard, be active, with that you are mapping your career path.

Add Value, Relax, don’t worry, money and fame will chase you.

If you check my facebook,twitter and IG timeline, i have been preaching about adding values, I saw the benefits that’s why I’m telling you to do it.

The society doesn’t have any choice than to pay valuable people

I started a free training on whatsApp, just to add value

Teach that little thing you know, it will make you a better person.

Write about that little thing you know, it will make you an authority in your niche.

Take pleasure in giving out, without expecting to receive, yes! Don’t expect . When you expect, you hope and when it fails, you become broken.

In a nutshell, have a blog, start one now with medium, write out what you learned here, share it, tell people and tag top people in your niche. Soon you will become and authority, money and jobs will chase you

Narrow down your skill

With different libraries,framework asking you out, I wont advice you to go on a date with them neither will I tell you not to answer their calls. However, its advisable to be a specialist and not a generalist.

I understood this from Senor John Sonmez blog. If I was charged with murder, will I hire a generalist lawyer or specialist in criminology?

Its okay to pick different skills along the way but be focus and let people know you for that one thing, do the T shape learning.

Commit to learning FAST

Seriously,with lots of open source projects and companies adopting different stack.

Most job ads talks about devs that can pick up new framework, in order to be a fast learner, don’t skip the fundamentals, its imperative you know them and it will help you in becoming better.

Moreover, I’ll advice you intern or volunteer if they are not willing to pay, tell them you will do it for free, it will form you and also talk to your uncle or aunt that you can help them promote their brand by building a website for them.

Don’t run to upwork and start bidding for project, I wont advice you do that now, its important you start with people around you, in case you break stuff, it can easily be fixed.

Finally, build your confidence

You might suffer from inferiority complex but you can as well overcome it by constantly telling yourself who you are and always celebrate small victories.

I hope you’ve gotten stuffs, kindly share by clicking on any social media icon below.

KIndly share.

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Adedapo Ajuwon
HackerNoon.com

DevSecOps/SRE. Building scalable infrastructures with detailed attention to security