Becoming a front-end developer from a bakery — János Farkas’s story

CodeBerry Programming School — Student Stories

János Farkas is a construction technician, an applied graphic artist and a baker by profession. He has been working as a junior front-end developer at Y-collective (a Hungarian company) since January.
In this episode of Student Stories, let us take you on a follow-up journey with a former CodeBerry Programming School student.

Intro

I live here: Pécs, Hungary
I work here: Y-collective
I studied at CodeBerry for this long: 2 months
I use: PHPStorm, Stack Overflow, CSS-tricks, W3Schools

When you’re asked about your profession, how do you answer?

First of all, I say that I am a programmer, usually everyone understands this.
In most cases people are interested when I tell them my profession. So, I give more details by explaining that I prepare the user interface of web pages visible to users.
Sometimes I work on server-side scripting too…

What did you do for a living before you switched to web development

This is the first time I work as a website developer. However, I started to get familiar with this field much earlier. I’ve been interested in this field for the past 10 years, but I only started taking it seriously last year. So far I only created some smaller websites (and I would do these in a different way now :) ). As for my previous jobs, I worked in the trading sector for 10 years.
As the manager of the bakery department of a 7000 square meter superstore, my task was to supervise production, procurement, schedules and anything related. So, it was quite a big change for me.

Why did you decide to start studying web development?

I have always been fascinated by the software part of computer science.
Each year, the internet and web-related technologies play greater and greater role in our everyday life. This results in an urging need of more and more professional developers. I would like to take this chance. :)

Tell me a little about where you work now, what your duties are. What do you do on a typical day or week?

I work as a junior site builder at Y-collective. Our office is in downtown Pécs.
At the beginning of the week there is a project management meeting where the tasks are determined and assigned. So it is more or less clear what everyone is going to work on during the week and maybe the following week.
We have a lot of projects, so we have quite a variety of tasks.
And it may happen that some urgent matter or a bug comes up on an ad hoc basis.
My days usually start around 6 a.m., with a coffee. While drinking it, I glance over the news or I read about something I was dealing with the previous day.
I usually go to work by bike. The official working hours are from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, plus at times I stay a half hour or an hour longer.
Besides developments we do changes, bug fixes, importing existing modules to other projects, administrative duties, database modification…
We recently started to concentrate more on unique WordPress developments.
At times it needs some research, or a plugin change, so it’s not boring.
What I use daily is PHP, HTML, CSS, SCSS/LESS, Javascript/jQuery, Node/Bower, Bootstrap, and git.
There are weekly/biweekly internal training sessions and meetups on some subject.

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How long were you looking for a job? Was it hard to find a place to work?

After all I wasn’t looking for a job for long. Or rather, I did not expect to be able to enter the world of IT within such a short period of time.
Adam Freisinger, one of the mentors at CodeBerry asked me about my professional goals, as I was making good progress with the materials.
I didn’t keep it a secret that I intended to work in this field, so he organized an interview for me, then I got a trial task, and later a job.
Hereby I’d like to thank everyone for the support, I’ll do my best to make up for it :)

How did you learn programming? What kind of courses, books etc. did you use?

At first I researched online materials, read articles and did tutorials.
Then there was even more self-studying and then the next step was CodeBerry.

What did CodeBerry offer you? What was it like to study at our school?

I was looking for an online course that could help me get to the next level. But for various reasons none of them seemed really good.
Then I stumbled upon CodeBerry. I really liked the approach: they not only realized that individuals need this course, but also that the IT sector is in need of junior professionals. A symbiotic relationship is built from this approach, which serves everyone’s needs.
Studying is completely personalized: everyone can progress at their own pace. If someone is stuck, help is available from the Slack community, and Amanda.
I wouldn’t say that I found very many new pieces of information in the teaching material, but for me, it was very useful for revising, for filling in the gaps I had, for deepening my knowledge…
Personally, the extra service CodeBerry provided me was that I could assess my knowledge quite well, so I was more confident to make the decision to try myself out.

Do you have any experience, tips or tricks to share with those who are just starting their studies?

Start a side project while studying. Give a solution to a real problem, no matter how small it may be. You can learn a lot this way. Feel free to copy a solution or parts of it, but plan your own version and analyze and understand the parts that are not obvious for you.

What is the next step for you? What direction are you taking?

First of all, I definitely want to deepen my knowledge and catch up with my colleagues. We have a very well-prepared and seasoned team. Everyone is really good at what they do, and I learn a lot from them every day.
Then I want to reach my own limits, and then… we’ll see. :)

In our “CodeBerry Student Stories” series we chat with our students who succeeded at finding a job as a developer.

Would you like to learn how to code? Come and try our first lessons for free at CodeBerry Programming School.