So how do you “break into” the tech industry? I have heard this a lot, and it makes me think of the antiquated idea that you can’t get experience unless someone pays you to do it full time. Here is the best piece of advice I can give to anyone who wants to work in the tech industry…

BUILD SOMETHING

…Anything, just start somewhere and build something. Building software is not something you can read about and then just become a great software engineer. It takes practice and failure. Go write some bad code, hack some libraries together that you don’t fully understand, until you get something that barely works, and could crumble at any moment. From there you iterate and figure out what you can do better. Not sure what that one library does? Great, now you have something to talk about. Reach out to anyone you can find that knows that library and tell them “hey, I built this thing, I don’t really know how it works, can you tell me about x?”.

But Where Do I Start?

Again, what you build doesn’t really matter, but pick something that is interesting to you. What you build doesn’t have to solve some huge problem or serve billions of users. Build something small and iterate. If you really don’t know where to start follow these steps:

1. Pick a topic you enjoy (food, travel, sports, books, movies) and see if there is an API you can use.
2. Write some code to interact with that API.
3. Iterate. Can you make your code better? What can you do with this data? Can you take data from one API and pass it to another API that analyzes it? Does your code have a user interface or do you have to run it through the command line?

Did all that? Great. Keep building and keep writing code. Are you an expert now? No, but that’s okay. You have some experience, and something you can talk about in interviews.

Questions? Comments? Feedback? I’d love to hear it, let me know.