31 Steps To Become A Developer
An alternative way to learn coding
Before I learned how to code I used to ask developers I met how much time it took them to learn their craft — and how the managed to do it.
They would answer stuff like 1.5 years, a bachelors degree or I just started playing around with it— none of which really satisfied my curiosity. I wanted to know specifically how much work they had put in, as I was wondering if I could ever possibly do it myself (which I doubted, as it seemed close to impossible).
Now that I’ve finally went through it and gotten a job as a developer at Xeneta, I think I’m able to give the answer I was looking for.
So if you’re an amateur wondering how much effort it takes to become a professional developer: this post is for you.
Here are all the courses and projects I’ve done since I got started, along with some advice I picked up on the way.
PHASE ONE: INTRODUCTION
I’ve divided my learning path into three phases; introduction, hobby and bootcamp.
My introductory phase started in the beginning of 2012 and lasted almost two years. The progress was slow and it all happened quite sporadically, without proper structure or goals. In hindsight, I wish I had started off more seriously, which brings me to my first advice for aspiring developers:
Remember that it’s never too early to start being serious about your learning. Your future self will thank you for this.
Codecademy
As many others I started off with Codecademy, completing four of their tracks: Javascript, HTML&CSS, jQuery, PHP. This gave me a mental model of what coding was. If you’ve never written a single line of code before, Codecademy is an excellent starting point.
Interactivity For Kids Apps
After Codecademy, I knew just enough to do simple interactivity for a few kids book apps my startup created. It consisted of simple web animations: tap a <div> tag and an image fades in and out while triggering a sound.
30 Days To Learn jQuery
Fast forward to the end of 2013. I did the 30 days to learn jQuery course at TutsPlus made by Jeffrey Way, which is an excellent tutor. He takes you through a lot of interesting small projects.
If you’d like to learn how to create interactive websites, I’d recommend you to start with jQuery over Vanilla Javascript, because it’s easier to learn.
PHASE 2: HOBBY
Apart from the TutsPlus course, I did very little coding in 2013, as I spent all my time on my startup. Also, I didn’t really believe I could ever become a professional developer.
However, I got started again upon discovering Udacity in the beginning of 2014. This time, I was more serious, and sat a goal of educating myself at least one hour per day.
I find process based goals to be much more effective than outcome based goals. It feels less overwhelming, and the results always come automatically.
Udacity — Intro To Computer Science
The CS101 course on Udacity is a great intro to both computer science and Python, made by Dave Evans. This is where I properly learned about data types, functions, conditionals and other stuff, though I only finished 80%. To be honest, I’ve never finished a single MOOC, as I quit as soon as I get bored.
Don’t feel bad for dropping out of a course — you’re not in school anymore. Be aware of boredom, as it’s poisonous to your motivation.
Udacity — Web Development
I followed up with CS253, created by reddit co-founder Steve Huffman. It takes you through building a blog, and is a natural next step after CS101.
Simple Javascript Game
At some point in early 2014, I became interested creating Javascript games. I started off with this tutorial, which takes you through creating a very simple JS game, where you control a character with the arrow keys in order to catch goblins.
Mine Sweeper In Javascript
I followed up with the classic Mine Sweeper game, as explained in this tutorial. This was tough, and I remember feeling a bit overwhelmed by the logics. Though I like to follow through regardless of not always understand whats going on (which I write more abut here).
Snake In Javascript
At some point I also created a snake game. I can’t remember exactly which tutorial I followed, but it could have been the one below.
jQuery Game — Shopping For Kids
During eastern of 2014 I built a demo for an educational app for kids, as our startup had gotten a request from a company that was going to turn their Flash games into HTML5. Though we didn’t take the job, I wanted to know if I had enough coding skills to do a job which I theoretically could get paid for.
It’s surprising how little knowledge you need to start generating a little bit of money on your coding skills. Try and get to this point as soon as possible.
Udemy — Coding For Entrepreneurs
In the early summer I did the awesome Coding For Entrepreneurs tutorial by Justin Mitchel. It’s a completely project based course and follows a learning by doing methodology. It’s a great intro to the Django Python framework.
While the Udacity courses will give you a foundation of CS concepts, this one will enable you to use your skills practically. Combining these types of courses is critical.
House Of Fam Website
My first paid job as a developer was to code a simple website (which my co-founder designed) for a Norwegian fashion designer. It’s a great feeling to finally get paid for doing your hobby, as you realize you can finance growing your skills further. Even though we made peanuts compared to the hours we put into it.
Don’t worry about hourly rate being below minimum wage for your first job. It’s still infinitely more than you got paid for your last project.
The Disco Fingers Website
I also built a simple landing page for our music creation app Disco Fingers, which our startup launched in late 2014.
Disco Fingers Top Songs Crawler
After launching Disco Fingers I wrote a Python script that crawled our internal list of Disco Fingers beats and tweeted a link to the most popular beat every day. This taught me a lot about API’s, cron jobs and scraping.
Creating a script that saves you time feels empowering. I’d recommend you to try this out.
Udacity — Supervised Learning (ML)
At the end of 2014 I started getting fascinated by machine learning, so I took a few lessons of this course. I‘d recommend it if you’re interested in getting mental model of what machine learning is. But it doesn’t involve any coding, which was kind of disappointing.
CoderByte Challenges
In order to improve my fundamental skills (which you can read more about here) I solved a lot of challenges on CoderByte.
Tic Tac Toe In Javascript
I also built a Tic Tac Toe game as a part of my applications to various coding bootcamps.
PHASE THREE: BOOTCAMP
At this point of time, I was good enough to create simple scripts and knew how to deploy a Django website if I followed the Coding For Entrepreneurs formula. But I was still was far from able to take on a job as a developer. This became my goal after our startup failed, so I applied for a bunch of coding bootcamps and finally chose Founders and Coders (FAC) in London.
FAC is built around weekly projects. Building these projects involved reading a lot of tutorials and taking small online courses — not all of which I remember. So I’m linking to the Github repo’s instead, in addition to the assignments. I’ve also noted which skills we gained from each task.
Week 1: Team blog
A basic blog using Github Pages. Source code is available at this repo, and the assignment here. Skills: Github Pages, CSS, jQuery, Jekyll.
Week 2: The Guardian API
A website that pulls in content from the Guardian API. Source code in this repo, and the assignment here. Skills: Web API’s, Ajax, JSON.
Week 3: Nearby Stuff
A social wall that display nearby tweets. Assignment & Repo. Skills: Servers, Node.js.
Week 4: Instagram & Twitter Search
An app where you can search for tweets and Instagram posts. Repo & Assignment. Skills: Heroku, MongoDB.
Week 5: D3 Tweet Visualization
This was the D3.js week on FAC. We experimented with how to create visualizations. Assignment & Repo.
Week 6: Note Taking App
Our first introduction to React.js, which I immediately enjoyed working with. Assignment & Repo
Week 7: Blog 1.0
A simple blog with authentication. Skills: Server side rendering, cookies. Assignment & repo.
Week 8: Blog 2.0
This time we added more authentication methods, e.g. Twitter, Facebook and email signup, and used the Hapi.js framework. Assignment & repo. Skills: Hapi.js
Week 9: Keyword King
The ninth week we got to build whatever we wanted. Our team built a site which analyzes your App Store keywords and tells you which ones are worthless. Repo is here. Skills: jQuery, Heroku, API’s.
Sir Predictalot
In week ten we started doing projects for clients, making a little bit of money. Our first one was a prototype for a Tinder’ish news predictions app. Repo.
RateMyStuff
A social network based around image rating. (I unfortunately don’t have an image of this one.) Repo
Coursera — Intro To Machine Learning
At some point during FAC I got started with this course. As usual, I did not finish it, but still learned a lot.
Machine Learning Week
I also did a one week machine learning stunt, where I tried to learn as much ML as possible. This involved a range of tutorials and trial and error, which you can read more about in this article.
Getting a job
After FAC finished I moved back home, and after about a month I got a job as a front-end developer at Xeneta, where I’ve been for around 5 months.
Hope this article has helped you get an impression of the amount of work it takes to become a developer. You can get there with less effort than I have, though not much less.
And remember to recommend this article :)
Thanks for reading! My name is Per, I’m a co-founder of Scrimba — a better way to teach and learn code.
If you’ve read this far, I’d recommend you to check out this demo!
