Hi everyone 
I’m super excited and happy to share with you this news:
I FOUND MY FIRST DEV JOB
I can’t express how grateful I am tho the whole freeCodeCamp community. Discovering freeCodeCamp curriculum and this forum was the best thing that has happened to me during my learning journey. Thank you!
Hoping that someone will find it useful I’d like to share with you some of my thoughts and lessons that I’ve learned during my coding journey.
Facts
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no university degree – I quit university by the end of first year
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no previous tech experience – I used to work as a waiter, barman and a customer service assistant
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no previous coding knowledge – the only thing I knew before I started learning to code was that a website is made of head and body
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location — I’m living in Poland and this is where I’ve been looking for a job
freeCodeCamp
I’ve already said that I’m really grateful for discovering freeCodeCamp. Here’s couple of reasons why:
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building projects – this is where I have finally started building projects on my own and when I started to build those I realized how little I have learned by coding along video tutorials
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feedback – whenever I finished a project I would post it on the forum and get really valuable feedback
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answering questions/solving problems – very often when reading some posts I thought that I knew the answer to the problem but I had no idea how to explain that. This made me read more about the subject and it was a great way to learn.
Sell yourself
If like me you don’t have any previous technical experience you have to make yourself stand out from the crowd and get your potential employer curious enough to contact you. Here’s what helped me achieve that:
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GitHub – nice and green commit history as a great way to show your determination and consistency
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Portfolio – your skills in action, all the projects gathered in one place
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Resume – I tried to keep it clean and simple
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Presentation – showing that your past experience, even if not technical, can be your strong asset
Interesting project that you’re proud of
During my interview I was asked to tell something about one of the projects that I put on my resume – Habit Tracker App. There is nothing super exciting about it, it’s not a new Facebook or Twitter but it’s doesn’t have to be. Most importantly it should be yours, built from scratch, not following some tutorial, so you can advocate every decision that you made while building it, what problems you had and how did you overcome them.
Resources that I used
Here are my favorite resources:
- freeCodeCamp – doesn’t need introducing
- CS50 – introduction to computer science
- Curran Keller – amazing materials especially about data visualization and D3.js
- MDN – resources for developers by Mozilla
- Kent C. Dodds – his blog, video curses and also open-source projects on GitHub
- Dan Abramov – video courses, conference talks and amazing JustJavaScript course
- React docs
and here’s a link to detailed, almost up-to-date list of the courses and tutorials that I’ve taken.
Questions that I got asked during technical interviews
- What’s the difference between
var,letandconst - What’s hoisting?
- What’s a scope?
- What’s a closure?
- What problem do the promises solve?
- What does DRY stands for?
- What’s the difference between regular and arrow functions?
- Describe
thiskeyword - How would you improve performance of your website?
- Why do we want our websites to be responsive?
- What’s the difference between Mobile First and Desktop First approach?
- What’s event loop?
- What are the features of HTML5?
During interview I mentioned that while doing CS50 I have been programming using C so I got the following question:
- What’s the difference between JavaScript and C?
It’s definitely not a full list but I can’t remember anything else at the moment.
DON’Ts
Don’t put on your Resume/Portfolio things that you have vague idea of, or you have used only during some course. Even though I knew this, I still made this mistake. On first version of my resume, in additional skills I put: “C, Python, SQL”. Because I’ve been using this technologies during CS50. And guess what? It’s been more than six months since the last time I used Python and I got asked some really simple question about it only because it was on my resume.
How long did it take me?
I intentionally don’t say how long did it take me because I think it’s irrelevant. We all have different backgrounds and circumstances so there is no point comparing the time that it took us to get a job. I think that the most important thing is setting your goals, working towards achieving them and beliving in yourself.
Thank you for reading this far, I hope that you’ve found something useful/interesting here and good luck to all of you that are still about to get this first dev job – I can’t wait to read your posts with these great news!
Update 26/02/2021
I’ve just signed the contract and I got offered the position of Fullstack Developer 
But it is all part of the process.
Great portfolio too. So awesome. 
