Hello everyone. I thought I would share my experience in getting a coding Job. To start off, I decided to learn to code 2 years ago. I was a couple years out of college and felt like I needed something that would provide me a stable career, and could also be leveraged into other areas of interest (neuroscience, serious games). I spent my first year understanding basic concepts. I was coming into programming from a fairly non-technical background. I had studied Geography in college and had pretty much avoided any hard math and science beyond the minimal requirements.
So during the first year I settled on web development as it seemed there was a fairly low barrier to entry, and the internet is ubiquitous. I learned HTML CSS, bootstrap. fairly basic stuff that didn’t quite fall under programming and I had avoided Javascript as it seemed very intimidating. Then in about april of last year I decided it was time to stop avoiding it and learn Javascript. That’s around the time I found FCC as well. So I started putting in significant time, probably about 10+ hours on average. Worked through the basic algorithms, but I was still lost at how javascript manipulated websites, what jquery was in relation to JS, things that seem simple to me now but had a hard time wrapping my head around at the time.
Fast forward to January of this year, I had moved to Lawrence, Kansas, and became vaguely aware of an organization called launchcode.com. They are a group that connects people who don’t have a lot of experience with programming “apprenticeships”. An apprenticeship is basically a paid internship to hire probationary period, where after 90 days the company you are set up with determines if they are going to hire you. In april, having only completed the random quote generator and halfway through the intermediate algorithms I decided I would apply. Now bear in mind, launchcode needs to vet you before they set you up with an apprenticeship, so you need to have a project that can show off a fair amount of technical aptitude.
I had an interest in creating dashboards so I worked on a project that would put data into a database and then get that data out of the database and display it. After adding authentication and authorization to my app (total process including building my project took from april to august)., launchcode felt I had demonstrated enough to move onto the next stage. It took about a month but I had an interview with a company and they want to take me on. It’s not a guarantee that they will hire me after 90 days but I’m going to work hard so that will be that case.
If anyone has any questions feel free to ask.
