How to be a rockstar developer in 3 months
This letter is dedicated to people who search for long term value, learn and develop new products.
Hello dear medium-er,
To prepare a better 2019, you should continuously learn to use the right tools and kick-ass your road to success.
The most significant results always came from long-term thinkers.
Steve was obsessed by efficiency
Steve Jobs saw from an early age the advantage of using tools.
In a study that measures the efficiency of locomotion, the Condor uses the least energy to move a mile.
Surprisingly, the humans were 1/3rd down the list and nowhere near as efficient as we’d imagined.
Not too proud of a showing for our folks.
That didn’t look so good.
However, a nerd in Scientific American wrote an article that compared a human on a bicycle to the Condor bird.
The human on a bicycle blew the condor away, completely out the top of the charts.
It was efficient by more than 300%.
A computer was for Jobs the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
At that moment Jobs understood that the key to the rapid evolution of the human species was tools and technology.
Just think about how significant influence Apple had on modern technology.
You can watch the full video here!
What can I do?
Improvements in all areas are yet to come, and only those who are capable of doing it will master the future.
Now can be a significant momentum for you to learn the right tools.
Being a developer requires many skills, and there are two significant factors in developing an ability:
- Active practice
- Support from senior developers.
You need to maximize both of these to help you become the best developer you can be.
sudo apt get install development toolsThere are three good ways, except for a 4-year college, to make sure that you’re on a fast track to start your developer career:
1. Coding Bootcamps
You can find a lot of bootcamps out there. I am not a fan of this one, but we need to accurately analyze the alternatives.
They can take you from zero to hiring in about 3 months. This means lots of active practice and tons of help from the developers running the Bootcamp.
The issues that you might have with boot camps are that they are usually 3 months of full-time study and they can cost from £3000 ($4000) to £15,000 ($20,000). That’s a lot of money to spend, especially when you’re not earning for those 3 months.
2. Getting a mentor
This is probably new to you. There are several reasons why a mentor is important.
You can find out more here.
The perfect situation: you learn to code and you have a senior developer act as your mentor and tutor. He could be a friend, family member, or just some other developer that wants to help you out. Having the experience to turn to when you hit a roadblock, having someone checking up on you and making sure you meet the progress is useful.
But getting a mentor can be hard. Let’s say you know a developer: a friend or an acquaintance. If you are lucky they may help you but there is a lot of extra work involved and not everyone is willing to go the extra mile.
Fortunately, you have the chance of getting an advisor right here.
Getting a mentor is the best case for those who are interested in crafting their products: solopreneur type of thing.
If you want to learn the right way to design and architect your new idea just follow this series.
If you are asking yourself any of these questions you are in the right place:
- What is the best way to start my idea?
- How should I start the project?
- Where should I start?
- What tech stack should I learn?
- Should I design my product as a SaaS or PasS?
- WTF is SaaS or PaaS?
- Maybe a mobile app is a better option?
- Which one should I start with: frontend or backend?
If you want to get hired and strive to be a critical player in a team or later target to be senior soon, getting a good mentor will boost your road to success.
3. Get a Job as a Developer
You probably ask yourself: how the hell can I do that with less to no experience?
Let’s draw a small plan!
If you want a career as a developer and you have just a few bucks to invest, you can learn to reverse engineer the process.
Going straight to career means jumping some steps ahead before you have those 10 years of experience required in the job description.
Getting your first job will give you a huge advantage — you’ll be getting paid to practice coding while working with senior developers.
I did this 10 years ago and it still works. What more could you want?
Right now there is a big gap in the market: indeed.com lists 200k developer jobs.
And on StackOverflow 200+ remote jobs are available.
Not even mentioning about this little fellow remoter.
Working as a developer exposes you to the side of development that you’ll not see while you study: the business side.
The job is a massive part of an event, as there’s no point in crafting products that nobody wants. Working with customers is a great skill that takes time to learn.
First search for the right job. See what the description and the required skills are. Prepare your resume based on that.
Work on small projects based on those requirements. Learn tools like VSCode and Git. One fundamental basis is to get some Javascript experience with algorithms training.
You need to build a portfolio to show to possible employers.
You can target 10 projects — HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Make sure that you’ve got all these in version control and uploaded to GitHub so that other people (future employers) can have a look and see how good you work.
Learn a library: Javascript comes with some: jQuery, React, Angular, Vue. Just pick the ones you see most relevant for the necessary job.
To get this more in-depth understanding of JavaScript,
I highly recommend the “You Don’t Know JS” book series.
For this, I have prepared a custome-tailored full stack developer series.
“The key to lasting change does not lie in planning big, monumental changes, but in thinking really really small” — BJ Fogg (Stanford Psychology Professor)
You can learn basics and get custom-tailored training based on your current level.
This series will cover all areas, and we will keep track of it in later articles:
💡 Getting an idea
📝 Plan
🗣 Talk to people
🗒 Sketch it until you make it
🤔 Decide the best
🛠 Build
📋 Responsive web design
📚 Javascript algorithms and data structures
📖 Front-end libraries and Back-end libraries
📊 Data visualization
👨💻 APIs and microservices
🔐 Information Security
🏆 Quality Assurance basics and unit testing.
🚀 Launch
🏦 Code interview. You can see some insights here.
Please comment on what is bad or missing from this plan!
We will target all these and keep a nice list here each week.
Your old problem of not knowing how to build your product is gone.
Well, we’ve come to the end of this article. But the end of one journey marks the beginning of another. Get ready! I’m excited!
I hope you’re pumped for a great 2019.
See you soon (and follow the series here to be notified)!
Teo
Thanks for reading! 😊 If you enjoyed it, test how many times can you hit 👏 in 5 seconds. It’s great cardio for your fingers AND will help other people see the story.
P.S. I’m learning a lot by helping others improve their coding skills.
If you also need some help with becoming more efficient at coding, e-mail me at teo.deleanu@gmail.com.
References:
- Thanks to Richard Reiss for inspiring people to read and to write. He did a great job with his finance series.
- Thanks to Toshi Nakamura’s article for the Steve Jobs photo
- EnglishCentral.com has the transcript for Steve Jobs video. Many thanks to Steve Jobs for inspiring the article.
- Thanks to Wesley Marc Bancroft for the confused people image.
- You can find out more about what a rockstar developer is here. I wouldn’t say it’s a myth since I personally know few of them.
