Brilliant! Congrats! That is extremely fast by anyone’s standards. What a lot of people don’t understand, is companies hire Juniors with the expectation to teach. They want easily malleable, hard working, and fast learning people. Again Congrats.
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Thank you for sharing your story! Great to know from other women here at FreeCodeCamp.
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Hey Francesca! I was hoping you’d post something from your coffee shop project. Looks fantastic so far!! If you can, post us a link when it’s up and running, I’d love to check it out.
Hiya Joey,
Sure here it is: http://amzn.to/2xRK6RD
Now I have to mention this again this is an older book, so at this point the loop and post call methods are probably depreciated, I recommend checking out this for updated loops: https://digwp.com/2011/05/loops/
BUT, the rest of the info is still pretty relevant. Especially stuff like what files you need to build a theme, and I like the way the author goes about piece by piece with converting a static HTML site into a wordpress theme.
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I will! Thankyou 
I am a bit stuck, waiting for content and direction from the client so I will move forward when I can.
Nice !
Learning Web Dev exhausts me. Congrats !
It sure does! Gets better as more of the little parts become understood by the brain.
Thanks for sharing!!! That’s the moment where most of us are looking for 
Congratulations for finding yourself in a tech Job so soon. This will inspire many of us!
About algorithms section, I got your point that maybe it’s not crucial for getting the first job, but I’d like to share another point of view about how the algorithms section contributed to my learning process.
I can say that this algorithm section was a game changer on my programming student life.
When I faced some intermediate algorithms I just felt like you… a bit frustrated for couldn’t know where to start … and even after completing, my solutions wasn’t good and I felt bad when checked the FCC solutions / other people solutions… but you know what? I kept going on because this frustration kept me feeling that I needed to face and overcome that stage.
And then I started the to adopt the same process for all challenges:
- Read 2 or 3 times the challenge slowly
- Open all the suggested documentation and read what the feature do, how, and why
- Open the “Hints” item and read the hints
- Start trying to solve
- When I get to a solution, then I try to refactor it, checking where it could be better.
This process made me:
- Come with better solutions time by time
- Feel confident that I could do it
- (best of all) Be independent! Nobody was holding my hands anymore! No tutorials, no videos, no pre made answers…
I changed my way of learning… for the first time I was not scared to face some things alone, I didn’t need a tutorial anymore,… I’ve felt confortable to know that you’re totally able to research (docs, stack overflow) / learn / try , and tackle the solution.
Sooner or Later I guess this is a important characteristic that everyone needs to have. The independency, and the confortable feeeling that you’re totally able to research and learn and tackle things that looks preety hard.
That’s why I recommend everyone to do the algorithms section. Even if you come with the worst solutions possible… In the future you’ll be better, you’ll feel more confortable with it… but Try it… put yourself on an unconfortable position now, I guarantee it will payoff!!
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Hi Ross,
You are welcome, glad to be of some inspiration, god knows it helped me seeing others getting a job.
In regards to the algorithms section, I kind of completely agree with everything you said which is why I mentioned I am not giving up on that section and continuing to work through it and develop my algorithm skills in different ways like playing code combat for now.
After a few months of playing codecombat I can feel my brain changing, and I totally get that independent and happy and confident feeling from being able to problem solve on my own.
My only issue is that my brain actually NEVER had any experience with any sort of problem solving, I am not a logical girl, I am intuitive and creative, that is how I have always solved problems, from my gut and my heart, so these algorithms are a completely different ballgame. I remember sitting there, doing everything you said, reading the challenge for like a day, reading all the documentation, and still having no idea where I would start. So my problem with that part is that I personally feel, my brain needed more warming up and more knowledge to get to be at a level to start to really understand what I might be able to do. I was still completely able to go ahead and do all the projects by myself without solving any of those algorithms. And if I had stayed there stuck and not moving forward trying to solve this and not have skipped to the projects, or studied more javascript online on other courses to get a better handle of it, I wouldn’t have my job now. I had to be proactive and try to determine what was best for me instead of sitting in a corner staring at a wall trying to find something within that wasn’t there. I believe this also made me more independent and able to problem-solve too! (but in a different way) 
So I am happy that I was flexible and did what was right for me to move forward. Doing projects was what has really helped my brain start to develop those skills, as well as playing code combat online (have you tried it) its amazing!
So that was really the initial point I was trying to make when bringing that up.
I’m actually very excited moving forward to get better at solving the algorithims, while I am also doing things that are practically moving my career forward, like learning the java script I need for the word press sites at work, which the algorithims have nothing to do with in my opinion, they might make me faster at problem solving in the long run, but learning exactly what I need is also very quick too.
So glad you are learning better now and feeling yourself become more independent
There are some really cool sites out there I joined up to where you can solve algorithims and potentially even get hired or spotted for your problem solving skills! These are things i am also working on, on the side!
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Yeah! You’re right! Everyone finds thier own path on this learning process. Thanks for sharing your experience and thank you also for this Hackerrank tip, looks like it really worth! Going to check it!
ahh and by the way I checked the links you posted about jobs you made… looks pretty nice!
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This is truly a transition! So what exercises did you actually started doing apart from the pink calculator? Those online free javascript courses do my head in. Likewise I get stuck at boolean expressions and algorithms. I’ve had a friend try to teach me but his like giving me exercises that aren’t even practical like draw a circle or a line using JS. 
Francesca,
Thank you so much for your post, and all of your well thought out replies to the comments. First and foremost congratulations on your job! I think one of the take home lessons here is that there are many paths to the same destination…the destination in this case being a job…Congrats again, and nice job on those websites you have links to. They are really nice!
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I love your story to getting your first developer job. It has brought life back in me and has encouraged me to move on because I want to be a freelancer (though I was able to finish the algorithm exercises). It has also taught me the importance of having a right attitude towards anything in life. Your websites looks great. Here is also my live website, still working on it though, it will be up for production as soon as am done with it, it’s on digital branding. Thanks also for the hanker rank link you shared. I will get there with the right attitude.
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Hi Francesca, congrats on your new job and thanks for sharing. Could you please post how you worded your reply mail. It will help us a lot. I know it will help me at least, lol. I started a couple of hours ago. Thanks.
Hi,
I did post the email that I wrote to the company further up for a few other people. Is that what you mean?
I could not find it. Lemme re-check. Thanks.
Thanks J. I really appreciate.