If I were doing this, knowing what little I know already I’d do the following, with the huge caveat that this is based on the assumption you are able to commit full-time work-like hours to this (like, 40hrs a week).
Learning: Months 1-3
- Start working through the beta curriculum - you won’t earn points or certificates yet, since it’s not officially live, but you ain’t in this for the certs and points. The beta curriculum is significantly better.
- Find your local freeCodeCamp meetup and start going to it right away, if one exists.
- Be involved on the forum. Answer more questions than you ask - it’s the fastest way to learn!
- Complete the ‘Responsive web design’ tutorials and all of the Applied Responsive Web Design Projects. The estimated time for completion for this is 180 hours - so that’s your first month. Develop the projects locally, not on Codepen, and learn to use git, GitHub and GitHub-Pages.
- In your down-time listen to the following podcasts: ShopTalkShow, Soft Skills Engineering, CodeNewbie, Base.cs, Codepen Radio. Dig through their archives and binge them. You want to live and breathe the industry right now.
- Next, move on to the Javascript part of the beta curriculum. Estimated time: 130 hours - most of your second month.
- Finally, work through the Front End Frameworks section of the beta curriculum. Again…this is another 180 hours. Your third month.
Note: When I say finally, that is not really the end, but the beginning. You won’t be super employable by this stage, but you will have enough projects under your belt that you could possibly hustle a decent position.
Hustle: Months 4 & 5 (although start all this from day one)
- Polish your best pieces for your portfolio.
- Make the designs excellent,
- make the pages accessible (read the beta curriculum material on accessibility, and google around for a11y materials - a11y is a useful ‘codeword’ for finding current accessibility stuff)
- make the pages FAST - minimise, uglify, and offload intensive assets to CDNs
- refactor your code so that you follow a consitent coding style / naming conventions etc.
- Polish your LinkedIn.
- Be active on Twitter - Dev twitter is awesome. If you want some tips on who to follow, look at the people I follow and follow most of them
(my twitter handle is the same as my forum one). - Write about your learning experiences. Try to get featured on the freeCodeCamp Medium publication, but even if you can’t publish something pretty regularly. You want to build a web presence that gets you popping up in people’s searches. The golden rule for blog posts: If you overcome a frustrating problem, write the blog post you wished you’d found that would have helped you.
- Participate in Hackathons.
- Attend other meetups, not just fcc ones. Don’t aim to sell yourself as a potential hire, just meet people, hear about what makes them tick. Be a cool human who happens to be in the market for a job. You’re building real connections, not just trying to leverage strangers to get a job.
- Apply for all the jobs. Focus your applications on the things that interest you, but also apply for those that might not. All interview experience is good, and it’ll give you a sense of what the industry norms in your area are.
Notes
You could do all this and still end up without a job.
That’s probably what will happen, in fact.
But…if you want to give it your best shot…this is pretty much what that looks like, given your short time frame.
Rule Number 1: no bikeshedding. Don’t keep switching languages and frameworks. These are good modern classics: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, React, Webpack, Sass. There are other options, but get good at one thing in each domain - don’t keep switching.