Programming Speedrun
I’ve supercharged last year’s speedrun template and added more options
What should I build?
I field that question a lot. When you’re learning to program, sure, you have to spend a fair amount of time reading the docs, hitting some courses, diving into books — but then you get to the point where you know some stuff and the one thing that will really up your game is practice — a lot of practice. You know the syntax, you’ve built a couple tiny things that if you put them on your portfolio will literally scream “I’m a junior dev who’s never built a real thing in my life” at potential employers. The one thing differentiating you from a “real dev” is that they’ve spent hours every day for a good long while building “real things”. So, to answer “what should I build” —
Do a speedrun of reasonably complex projects that reflect the type of projects you’d like to be hired to do.
Last year, I kicked off a few beginner speedruns. They were all intended to get folks pushing to wrap up as many projects as possible in a month. I intentionally started with simple stuff (the FreeCodeCamp projects) in order to set up a motivating sequence that people could push through and “finish”.
Taking it up a notch
This year, I’m taking it up a notch. Yes, the FCC projects are one option. But, I’ve also added options for Game Development, Frontend, Full Stack, React, Vue, Angular, CSS, Open Source Contributions, and Algorithms. These options are harder — the Frontend option, for instance, will push you to create the type of frontend interfaces that you’d reasonably be expected to produce “on the job” because, lets face it, pulling data from one API end point and crapping it onto a barebones HTML page with less than 20 lines of CSS code will get you through a FCC challenge, but it’s not really going to impress a potential employer who needs to hire someone to put a stylish modern frontend together — it’s just not.
You can still start with the FCC Speedrun. You can do as many of them back-to-back as you want. You can redo the same one several months in a row to gauge your progress over time. You can start your “next” speedrun where your last left off if you only made it partway through the list.
You can challenge your friends to a friendly competition —
who can finish the most this month
You can set aside a month to invest in the kind of heads-down coding practice that will cement everything you’ve learned and convert what you “sorta know” into “what you can do easily.”
This month, I am personally doing the Game Development Speedrun. If you’d like to join in, or dive into any of the other Speedruns, all you need to do is fork the Speedrun Repository, make a note in the README showing what Speedrun you’re doing, click into your chosen Speedrun and start at the top, building everything on the list.
