After a relatively chaotic path through academia where I studied business, kinesiology and neuroscience (non-exhaustive list…) I decided to become a web developer by attending Le Wagon in Montréal during summer 2017.
This has proved to be one of the best decisions of my life, but obviously it wasn’t all clear to me what to do from there. Today I have almost 3 years of experience as a front-end developer and feel like I’ve gained some perspective to write about a few things I wish I had known when I had just finished the program.
Obviously, I am biased by my personal experience coming from Le Wagon and looking to be a front-end dev, but I think the points I present here are relevant for anyone who is looking to keep on learning and to kickstart their career in tech. So here is my intake on a couple of strategies to follow after a bootcamp if you’re looking to work as a web developer.
Learn JavaScript
Wether or not like Le Wagon your bootcamp isn’t mainly dedicated to Javascript, improving your JS skills should be one of the first things for you to focus on. Ruby on Rails is great, it lets you build a full stack app easily and it made its proof with great web apps such as GitHub, but now few jobs ask for RoR skills. The idea here is not to say that this language is the absolute best, but JS is the #1 language to this day, and therefore the most looked for on the job market.
JavaScript has eaten up the whole world. The internet is all about JS. It might not be the best choice for all of those things, but you can do anything with it, from backend to mobile apps, from VR to machine learning. Getting a job is the best way to keep on learning to code, and being proficient in JavaScript is your best shot to get a job. You will have plenty of time to learn whatever other language or technology you’re interested in, this is about what it’s strategically best to learn first.
I dig deeper at the things you need to learn at this stage in this article.
Don’t learn a framework at first, learn the fundamentals
Now, if I’ve convinced you to bet on JavaScript here is my second advice. Don’t jump right into the latest trendy JS framework. At this point in time React is number 1 with Vue as its main challenger and Angular a good third but seemingly fading away. Then you have cool things like Svelte growing as well. This wasn’t the exact setting of things when I started and it might not be true anymore next year. That’s how fast it can change.
Even though things seem have settled a little, frameworks come and go, the fundamentals stay.
It’s a cliché but it’s true, you have to learn the fundamentals before you get into frameworks. It’s the case for any programming language and I wish I had understood this better when I started to learn on my own after Le Wagon. The key is to develop solid mental models of every concepts early on, it will save you a lot of time in the long run, make you a better programmer and give you more confidence when you’re learning some of the more advanced stuff.
One of my favourite resources to build a strong understanding of JavaScript is the Just JavaScript e-mail series by Dan Abramov which presents both accurately and poetically all of the JS basics. It is not yet finished to this day in and not its final version from what I understand but it’s already very much worth a read, even if you feel like you know the language pretty well.
The second one, maybe a bit less accessible but very comprehensive, is the series of short books by Kyle Simpson titled You don’t know JS.
If reading is not your preferred choice to learn, you will also find plenty of great content on YouTube. And once you’re past the basics and want to learn more advanced things, I’d recommend egghead.io if you’re ready to put some money in your training (or if you can get your company to pay for it).
Find a job, not an internship
At least in Europe, the market isn’t saturated yet. The currently ongoing Covid-19 crisis might put a (temporary) hold on this, with less open positions for juniors, but as a developer, you can get paid to learn. It would be a shame to pass on an occasion you do not have in many fields. Internships salaries are simply disrespectful in regards to what a junior developer can provide to a company after a short period of training.
Don’t be picky at first, chances are low that you’ll get the job of your dreams as your first experience, but it will let you keep on learning without being financially insecure. If you can’t find an interesting company to hire you in your desired area, maybe you can look for an IT services company. They don’t have the best reputation as employers but it will give you a first experience and it’s usually all you need to compete for the cool jobs.
Ideally, you should find a company with senior developers who like to teach you how things are done and where the company will allocate time for them to do so.
Build stuff
Having a job is great, but you never learn faster than when you have to do everything by yourself. Unless you get to work on a project from scratch with your team, there are plenty of things you won’t have had to do. Even if you’re there from the start, tasks will be split and, for example, you won’t know how i18n was set up because someone else had this responsibility. This is why working on side projects lets you learn more and faster than on your job most of the time.
Seeing all the fancy projects that developers show off on the internet can be discouraging. Just start with something very modest and grow from there. For example, instead of aiming to build a classy portfolio or personal website right away, just start by a simple “internet business card”, something with a picture, an introduction to who you are, social media links if you like, how to contact you and let’s say a button to download your CV. And from there, you’ll have a basis to work on. You can add new features one by one as they come to your mind or by trying to copy cool things you find on the internet. Obviously, if you have an idea for an ambitious project from the start, nothing wrong with that. Give it a try.
You can start by following tutorials (on YouTube if you want to keep it free, or udemy if you’re ready to pay a little), but don’t spend too much time on them. Solving the problems you will face by yourself will leave a much stronger footprint in your memory and give you more confidence on your skills.
Teach others what you’ve learnt
To practice in order to learn is common knowledge. Something people are less aware about is that cognitive sciences have shown that teaching others is also a very efficient way of learning.
If you are an alumnus of Le Wagon, you could offer to be a teaching assistant during workshops or even lead one, or become a TA during the bootcamp classes if your work schedule allows it. If not, presenting something in a local meetup is another way. It doesn’t matter if you’re relatively new to coding, you can invest some time in a specific topic and explain the basics to workshop attendees. This is the preferred way of many people to discover new technologies or techniques, so even though you feel like you are just restoring knowledge that’s available to anyone online, you’re making both yourself and these people a favour.
Needless to say that this is also a great way to build a reputation in tech and it could very much help you to land a job. I personally met great people by doing this a few times.
Don’t fear impostor syndrome
Programming is a weird thing, you will constantly go from thinking you’re completely stupid to feeling like you’re a genius. Impostor syndrome is a thing and some argue that it never goes away entirely, so you better learn to live with it. It comes and goes as you get more comfortable with the technologies you’re currently working with, but everyone goes through it at some point.
You might be subject to it more than others in this industry when you don’t have a computer science or engineering degree, but coming from a different background, you will have built a different set of hard and soft skills which have their value as well. It’s as simple as being able to communicate properly both in written and oral form, you might be surprised by how valued this is by some employers as they struggle to hire developers with those sort of skills. If you feel like you’ve wasted your time studying biology when you’ve always been a nerd at heart, you may be happy to hear that some books even claim that having switched path or specialized late gives you an advantage. But I won’t get into details here as it could be the topic of an article on its own.
Conclusion
Just keep on learning. One of the most valuable things you learn from a bootcamp is how much you can learn in a short period of time when you go all-in on something. With this in mind, take advantage of the millions of resources you have online
I hope those advices will be useful to some of you. I tried to write about the things I wish I knew when I was in this position. If you have any question you can leave a comment, send me an email or if you’re part of Le Wagon, feel free to message me on slack where my name is simply “milan”.
Thanks for reading!
