From knowing nothing to working as a Front-end Developer
This is my experience. How I landed my first developer job in a UI/UX Studio.
I’m a 25-year-old self-taught developer. I started learning 1 year ago.
I completed my Master’s in 2017. During the three years I spent at university, I was uneasy, and I wasn’t sure why. I believed that the unhappiness and taste of dissatisfaction was something normal as a young adult in university.
I thought: “all this will change once I’ve graduated and got a job out of my degree!”
But by the time I arrived in my final year, I realized a couple of things:
- I had no real experience doing web development — and not much programming experience in general.
- I wasn’t really sure what I was getting into.
Getting the Basics
After deciding I wanted to get into web development, the first question on my mind was “What do I learn?” After doing some research, I ended up making my learning path based on what most entry-level web developer positions asked for, which was:
- HTML & CSS
- Bootstrap — Popular front-end framework for building responsive, mobile-first sites,
- JavaScript / Jquery
- Angular / React.js — JavaScript framework
- PHP / Node.js
- Git
So then I started…
I started teaching myself about web development. Starting with HTML & CSS, I picked up my pace and then started learning JavaScript, jQuery, and PHP. Eventually, I practiced and built a website. I used Codecademy, freeCodeCamp, and W3school They’re free and great for learning the basics. One particular platform called Udemy can help you learn web development right from scratch with real-time projects.
My First Real-Time Project
One day, I reached out to one of my professors for real-time projects. He referred me to one of his friends Majeed who was looking for a web developer.
That is how I plugged in and got my first real-time project.
It took me 45 days to complete the project. Throughout the project, Majeed and one of my college senior Anuj Kumar were helped me. They guided me in every part of my learning curve. I am really thankful to them.
I learned so many things from that real-time project while I enjoyed developing it. I decided that I will focus on that.
Preparing Myself For Interviews
Now, I started working on my communication. Because somewhere I felt that communication is the main factor to crack the interviews in the IT industry.
Then I started applying for jobs on various job portals and now I am at the stage where I regularly get interview calls and job offers. So you need to make portfolios with some real time projects which help to learn as well as getting these much-awaited interview calls from your desired companies.
Now, a regular day of my life has a couple of interview calls and job offers.
And finally!!
I landed a job as a Front-end / Web developer at a young and growing startup.
By now I have done 6 real-time projects.
There are still many more goals that I want to achieve as a professional. I choose to concentrate more on the JavaScript framework like React.js/Angular.
Currently, I have a list of other technologies I want to learn.
Look at Other People’s Code
Because other people know stuff too.
By looking at what other people do and how they did it, you can see things from a different perspective. Maybe you’ll notice some of your mistakes, how to fix something that’s bothering you right now, or you’ll find inspiration for something.
Check CodePen and web galleries regularly and look at what others did. Spend some time trying to figure out how they did something before looking at their code.
Conclusion
To be a kick-ass front-end developer, you don’t need to be a jack of all trades or know every framework and tool. You just need to listen carefully to your coworkers and be a useful middleman with the skills you got.
And Never stop learning!.
In this blog, I’m hoping to write about the things that I have found useful in my journey.
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