Cool, yeah, to be a web developer, you definitely need JS. There was a time when when HTML and CSS were enough, but that stuff is too easy to create with wysiwyg editors that anyone can use.
I also think I would like a clearer idea of what I need in order to be employed as a developer.
I think there are two reasonable answers to that:
- That is an impossible question to answer.
- More than you think.
That is a difficult question to answer. It is a sliding scale. You are employable right now, just not “very”. Every thing you learn makes you a little more employable.
So, what is a good path? I think FCC has a pretty good path. With that you will have a basic understanding of a MERN stack, a very respectable stack.
To break it down further, I would want this kind of a path:
- a good understanding of JS, including ES6 and ESNext
- a basic understanding of some basic algorithms
- a modern view library (React, Angular, or Vue) and their supporting libraries
- another approach would be a SSR library like handlebars or EJS
- some backend and API knowledge
- some basic unit testing knowledge
FCC covers those pretty well. I would say that you could probably skip over the Python sections for now. (They could make a good backend, but those sections still need to be developed - but the Node sections are well developed - either makes a good backend.)
After that, I think it’s about building projects, learning new libraries, and trying to get a little experience (freelance, opensource, etc.)
You just keep learning and building and building and learning. It’s the projects that you build that are going to make the biggest impression (other than real world experience). You build some projects with FCC, but except for the fullstack ones, they aren’t going to get much attention. And I think the ones that you invent from scratch will impress more.
I get scared that I’m not ever going to learn everything I need to know to be seriously considered for employment
You don’t have to learn everything. You don’t have to memorize everything. You have to understand a lot of things, know what is available, and know where to find the information. No one has all this stuff memorized.
It seems like there is so much and it gets overwhelming.
Yup.
It took a while for me to discover coding and that this is what I want to do.
I didn’t start my rebirth as a coder until I was 47. Just work hard and keep learning.
An old contributer here wrote up some interesting guides.
Yeah, getting that first job is hard. Very hard. At the risk of another shameless plug, I once wrote a doc with some thoughts on getting that first job. But read what other people say about it too. There are a lot of different ideas and a lot of them are good.