Junior developers ? you need a side project.

Nir Ben-Yair
Aug 27, 2017 · 4 min read

These are my two cents on the things that helped me the most to become a frontend developer.

In May 2015, I dropped out of my CS degree. I fell in love with programming but the academy just didn’t work out for me. In my last six month at the university I started learning frontend development from payed and free courses on the web.

Frontend just felt right for me, and I could spend hours watching tutorials. After some time (and with some luck) I even got paid for building simple websites for other people.

But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to build something that people will actually use, and since I like Memes, I thought: “there is no one good meme generator in available in Hebrew .- so I’ll make one”.

I knew a bit of HTML, CSS, JS and a bit of PHP back than, but I thought it could be a nice way to get better in those.

Finally, after two weeks of long nights and crappy mornings, I built a really bad looking meme generator using PHP, simple HTML and a lot of jQuery.

The process was fun and of course I improved my HTML and CSS abilities, but I also got to learn things that I wouldn’t get from any standard tutorial:
- How to google.
- The understanding that every answer to every question that a develoepr has can be found using google.
- The understanding that other developers already solved every problem I will ever have, and that they were also kind enough to write about it on the internet.
- How to actually publish my code to the world: buying domains, dealing with servers and hosting platforms.

And I earned another very valuable thing : I have something to show.

A lot of experienced developers advice junior devs to contribute to open source projects as one way to get better. But sometimes (really) junior developers are not familiar with git or the community, and it’s hard for them to figure out how to do that. Building a side project is much easier and accessible.

I got my first junior job after an interview in which I shown my working side project- my meme generator.
After a year or so in that position, coding a lot of HTML, CSS and jQuery, I thought that its time to learn React js.
After watching some tutorials and building some small example apps, I couldn’t really grasp the idea in full, so I thought again: “Let’s turn my app into a single page React app!”

So I started, and it wasn’t easy — I wasn’t familiar with redux, so the architecture was bad, and I used a lot of jQuery which is a terrible thing to combine with React (and misses it’s point…). But I got to learn React along the way !
And more important, I learned:
- How to deploy a single page app.
- How to write ES6 (An official upgrade for the javascript syntax)., and what is BABEL ( a tool that converts ES javascript code to the more current supported version of it (ES5).
- By building something so crappy, while I was coding I got the feeling that I was doing stuff wrong, which made me look for solutions for those problems: I also learned how to code better.
- While building a real-world app I encountered real-world problems.

Later on I wanted to learn Redux. So I did a rewrite to my app and integrated Redux into it. After a couple of tutorial videos, I learned Redux by doing.

After I got my second job, as a React developer, I was actually surprised to see how similar was my own app, to the app that my new company built. Of course it was much better and used a lot of concepts that I didn’t knew, but the foundations of it was quite the same.

Later on I wanted to learn some server side development so I integrated Node js into my app.
I decided that I want to keep my data in a data base, so I started with the simple Firebase database, and integrated it into my app too.

I feel that in some way I just couldn’t move from a point of a zero experienced developer to a hireable one without my side project. It was much easier to learn new things and to face real-world problems because of it.

I got lucky, my Meme generator is now used by thousands of people each day, so I got motivated to make it better. But even if its not something that people use, I believe its important to have your own live side project, to practice on for it to be a place to experiment new technologies and methods outside of the tutorials area.

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