I quitted my job and started freeCodrCamp

28 years old
never been to college
want to be a web developer and get a job before 2022

is freecodecamp all i need to be a web developer?

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First of all, I would not have suggested quitting your job. I hope you have a support system.

want to be a web developer and get a job before 2022

Getting a job in 10 months is pushing it. Possible? Sure. Probable? Not really. I don’t want to discourage you, just give you realistic expectations. If you’re talking about spending 50 hours a week working on this, maybe… But there are other factors besides time invested - natural aptitude, the job market where you are, how well you interview, what you work on, luck, etc.

is freecodecamp all i need to be a web developer?

That would be like asking, “Are guitar lessons all I need to become a professional musician?” Is it “all” you need? No. Is it a great place to start? Sure.

The FCC program lays a great foundation. The first 6 sections give you the foundation in a MERN stack, a very marketable skill. The next 4 give you some Python and various other skills - nice to have, but not relevant to that MERN stack. The last one is just a bunch of interview prep, which can be valuable.

But that’s not enough. Me, when I finished the FCC curriculum (this is before the Python stuff was there), I started building apps and learning new libraries. I did that for several months, did some open source stuff, worked on some projects with some friends. Then I hopped on upwork and did a few freelance jobs. Shortly thereafter, my interviewing skills were improving and I ended up being in the end stages of interviewing 3 companies. One of them made an offer and I accepted.

That whole process took me 20 months, from starting FCC to getting the job. #ymmv I can’t stress this enough - you can’t make a prediction about how long it will take you because it is a completely different situation. I had a little programming experience from decades ago, had studied engineering, but ended up with an MA in music.

I would plan on spending at least a year, possibly two. Maybe even more. Who knows. After the first three modules of FCC you can start applying, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. But who knows, you might get lucky and land some kind of entry level position. But just beware - getting that first job is EXTREMELY difficult. You can read old posts here for an idea.

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I would also add, in a different way to answer your question, that FCC is not all you’ll need in terms of materials.

First of all, one of the most important skills a dev can have is looking things up. On the job I’m constantly googling things and checking things out in Stack Overflow, MDN, maybe the documentation for a library.

Also, FCC cannot exhaustively teach everything. There may be some thing that you don’t quite get and may need to pause and go find something else that explains that in a different way or in more depth. That is a good and healthy thing to do - I would just warn against feeling that you need to learn everything perfectly and getting distracted from the FCC path (or whatever path you choose) - you want to keep moving forward.

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