On becoming a professional web developer in one year
From zero to webdev
Build your first website in 1 week.
This is how I started my journey into web development in January 2016. Of all the tutorials I did during this time I still consider it the best at both teaching and making me fall in love with the subject.
I honestly don’t even remember how I got there in the first place, I was working for a local nonprofit performing standard office tasks 30 hours a week as part of a one year contract.
I wanted to get into programming for quite some time and out of the blue someone in our office said “We should have a better website!”.
So I ended up starting that tutorial with the intention of making the nonprofit website a little bit better. It was the best decision I have ever made.
I still think that simple tutorial can provide a lot of value for new developers, the first lesson was about setting up your local environment, downloading an editor, and how to link different files (HTML, CSS and JavaScript).
That might seem like something not really important, all that matters is coding, right?
It all depends on what you want to achieve doesn’t it? Do you want to just hack or do you want a career as a professional developer?
Learn to use your machine cause that’s where you’ll be working, no serious company will hire you to code, test, and deploy on Codepen.
The FreeCodeCamp era
Soon after devouring that awesome resource I was eager to learn more.
I ended up finding a plethora of online coding bootcamps, mostly The Odin Project, CodeCademy and FreeCodeCamp.
I forgot some I was playing with but there is far too much content out there and I was totally lost in the beginning.
I was never really good at sitting still and listening to someone explain stuff or reading material without anything to practice what I’m supposed to learn (funnily enough now I have to read a ton of docs).
I ended up picking FreeCodeCamp as main resource, just because of the projects, as you might see from their website they don’t actually teach a lot,
it’s pretty much a list of projects you have to complete, the learning part is left to you to decide, but that was exactly what I was looking for.
After half-arsing the algorithms section (mostly a waste of time in the beginning, do them once you are more comfortable with programming in general, not to begin your journey), I got to the front-end projects, I got stuck a couple of times but in the end managed to complete the first cert in 3-4 months.
I started to use Codepen to share my progress, as I said before, coding locally is still the best option but at the time I did not know that so I used the website for both the front-end (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery) and data-viz (React, Sass) certificates.
The resource I used to learn enough to complete all these projects is the one FreeCodeCamp warned not to use: I checked the source code of other projects, taking apart other developers code is what taught me how to code.
I learned React entirely by following this method of learning. I tried a couple of tutorials but never got anywhere with them. By following a learning method that best suited me I was able to finish all the FreeCodeCamp DataViz projects in about a month.
My final FreeCodeCamp certificate was back-end in Node, I was really confused by this and spent a lot of time just trying to get my head around it, but once I was able to figure it out I managed to complete all the advanced projects in 2 weeks, partly because they were all pretty much the same.
After finishing that I just continued building projects myself, started contributing to open source and soon after I got my job.
You can read about that here.
What I actually learned doing FreeCodeCamp
An awful lot of tutorials are bad, they assume a certain amount of knowledge that you might not have, so most of the time you are just copy-and-pasting code you don’t understand.
A lot of online boot camps follow this model as it is really easy to complete tasks and be rewarded, giving the illusion of learning while actually not retaining anything.
What I actually learned was to be stubborn, no matter how difficult the task, in the end, by keep trying and keep checking others code, I could understand it. It’s ok to not understand everything the first time (Did someone say Webpack?).
Build stuff, make mistakes, and learn from correcting them. Don’t just do tutorials!
How I’d suggest someone to learn web development today
- Build your first website in 1 week, follow along, and code locally while watching.
- Job Ready JavaScript Edition 2.0 read books, do projects and stuff.
I previously said I don’t like reading books but I found out that one chapter + one project as reward after that is something I can deal with, some of you might need more, some less, but still, having the practice will make you stand out and having the theory will make you accomplish that faster.