On becoming a professional web developer in one year

From zero to webdev

I honestly don’t even remember how I got there in the first place, I was working for a local nonprofit performing standard office tasks 30 hours a week as part of a one year contract.

I wanted to get into programming for quite some time and out of the blue someone in our office said “We should have a better website!”.
So I ended up starting that tutorial with the intention of making the nonprofit website a little bit better. It was the best decision I have ever made.

I still think that simple tutorial can provide a lot of value for new developers, the first lesson was about setting up your local environment, downloading an editor, and how to link different files (HTML, CSS and JavaScript).
That might seem like something not really important, all that matters is coding, right?

It all depends on what you want to achieve doesn’t it? Do you want to just hack or do you want a career as a professional developer?
Learn to use your machine cause that’s where you’ll be working, no serious company will hire you to code, test, and deploy on Codepen.

Soon after devouring that awesome resource I was eager to learn more.
I ended up finding a plethora of online coding bootcamps, mostly The Odin Project, CodeCademy and FreeCodeCamp.
I forgot some I was playing with but there is far too much content out there and I was totally lost in the beginning.

The resource I used to learn enough to complete all these projects is the one FreeCodeCamp warned not to use: I checked the source code of other projects, taking apart other developers code is what taught me how to code.

I learned React entirely by following this method of learning. I tried a couple of tutorials but never got anywhere with them. By following a learning method that best suited me I was able to finish all the FreeCodeCamp DataViz projects in about a month.

My final FreeCodeCamp certificate was back-end in Node, I was really confused by this and spent a lot of time just trying to get my head around it, but once I was able to figure it out I managed to complete all the advanced projects in 2 weeks, partly because they were all pretty much the same.

After finishing that I just continued building projects myself, started contributing to open source and soon after I got my job.
You can read about that here.

An awful lot of tutorials are bad, they assume a certain amount of knowledge that you might not have, so most of the time you are just copy-and-pasting code you don’t understand.
A lot of online boot camps follow this model as it is really easy to complete tasks and be rewarded, giving the illusion of learning while actually not retaining anything.

What I actually learned was to be stubborn, no matter how difficult the task, in the end, by keep trying and keep checking others code, I could understand it. It’s ok to not understand everything the first time (Did someone say Webpack?).

Build stuff, make mistakes, and learn from correcting them. Don’t just do tutorials!

I previously said I don’t like reading books but I found out that one chapter + one project as reward after that is something I can deal with, some of you might need more, some less, but still, having the practice will make you stand out and having the theory will make you accomplish that faster.

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