How to kickstart your career as a developer
Being a developer is a fantastic opportunity. Not only do get to know about how the digital world operates and how stuff is made, how apps get deployed, how your Instagram feed is generated and how Amazon gets your orders, but you also exhibit the skills to work from absolutely anywhere and at anytime — on your terms, as you please.
It’s quite an exciting time to be a developer. With the myriad of tools available to us devs, the real-world applications that we can make on our own, and a volley of new technologies waiting to be explored and worked upon, there has never been an era where you can be school student shipping paradigm-shifting solutions to millions of people all around the globe. What’s more, we have so much to work upon, don’t feel excited about websites, how about making first-person shooters. Don’t feel like working on cloud mainframes, try machine learning, make an in-game self-driving car system or two. There’s a lot you can do with the development skillset, since most of the stuff you’ll learn in one discipline is easily transferable to any other domain within the development world.
While all this is true, most people don’t really seem to have an idea of how to go about learning to become a developer, and then the process of ‘getting into the industry’.
Most people don’t really have much idea as to where they should start.
That’s because this field evolves much faster than all other fields. Developers don’t learn skills and then sit on those skills for years, part of a developer’s job is to keep learning continually. This is what many people miss.
If you’re just starting out with development, I suggest you should check out some of these articles, then come back here when you’re ready for development and use this article to get going in the industry:
If you know how to code properly or have learnt most of the skills required for being developer, carry on with this article.
That’s all fine, but where to start ?
Beginning your career as a developer isn’t particularly difficult, and that’s kind of the problem.
It’s easy to get it wrong
That makes a lot of optional, non-obligatory stuff that you do prior to starting the search for work in other fields quite important in the world of development.
There’s a lot of stuff that, if you get it right, can pay long-term dividends.
First things first
First and foremost, you should focus on building a few simple projects.
That advice will get to you from a million places. All your mentors will say that, all online coaches will say that, all other programmers that you approach for advice will say that. Yet, it is really, really easy to neglect such advice.
It’s easy to think that you’ve learnt how to code, you’ve watched a lot of courses, tutorials, made the really complex projects that he instructors taught how to make, grasped the basics and also the advanced nuances of the tech stack you wish to work with. What most of us miss is that at best, these thoughts are pure delusion, you can learn that the easy way, or you can learn that the hard way.
Now at this point, what you ideally need to know is the core technologies of any stack (web dev, mobile dev, backend dev, game dev etc., whichever you want to work with) and also the surrounding technologies and workflows (a bit of design, databases if you’re making mobile or server-side apps, AWS, GCP or DigitalOcean, if that’s required by your workflow).
Along with that, you probably should have made a few small projects, and preferably a pretty large one — a condensation of all skills in conjunction, showing what your skills can achieve as a whole, what you have to offer. This large project will most probably be the focus your personality as a developer when you begin — whether it is your college portfolio or your job profile, it will probably be the one thing you would have to ‘show off’ the most. The smaller projects also hold a lot of importance, they can act like these quirky and awesome ideas that you’ve worked upon, which might not be very business-friendly in the wild, but are nice enough to show that the implementation of a certain feature or idea.
Work on open-source projects
Now, something that a lot of us don’t pay a lot of attention to is contributing in the open-source community. Honestly, this is something I ignored too, but I would suggest anyone who is just starting out to build up a nice GitHub profile and contribute as much as they can to open source projects.
I can’t think of a better way to build up experience, working on something big and expanding your network than contributing to open-source. Not only do you get a chance to contribute to software you’ve yourself used in the past, but you also meet and help lots of people from the community, some of which may be really helpful later down the line.
So, if you’re starting out, try contributing with some code to open-source repos, which might also provide you a lot of real world experience without any obligations.
That’s all the work on the development side that you need to do, minus some Hackathons which might just help you become a more reputed member of the development community.
Build a social presence
Now that you’ve got the development part out of the way, the next step is to build a social presence.
Why ? Because developing a network is how you can access better opportunities. Want an internship ? You can have people offer you internships without even applying for one. Want a job ? These platforms will allow them to find you, if what you do is important to them, easily.
You’ll have better connections and you’ll get more offers, even freelance work.
You might build a social presence through developer meetups, attending a few conferences, participating in Hackathons, hanging out with other devs, etc. For me, these were not realistic options, since I was a school student and didn’t really know any devs. So I started out with building a presence on social media.
I started with LinkedIn, which is still my favorite platform for networking. (Instagram just doesn’t seem to have the audience for professional dev stuff)
Starting out on LinkedIn
Well, there’s not really much to it.
Here’s the absolute basics to keep in mind:
- To begin with, get a nice and clear profile pic.
- Write out a pretty nice description, discuss all your specializations and what services you can offer. Be clear, concise and on point, don’t use fluff much.
- Don’t miss out on mentioning your skills and endorsements, certifications (if any), and other such details. These are crucial for your profile to feel complete.
- The most important — engage. And I mean a lot. Comment on relevant posts, and give relevant comments too. Post stuff yourself. LinkedIn also provides an article platform, which can be really helpful in making your profile look neat and professional.
- Learn how tags work (not just how they work but also how to use them very effectively for building up an audience).
What’s next ?
Now, armed with this basic information, you are probably ready to land that first job or internship.
These principles can be used to build up a personal brand too, but for that, you might need to up your social game.
That’s it for now ! Hope you found some value in reading this article. Do leave some comments about what you guys would like to read next.
