Just finished my first month being a web developer

So I just finished my first month of being a professional web developer and I just wanted to share my thoughts and tips for those who are still looking for jobs and want to be prepared.

As far as getting the job is concerned I found my job from my girlfriends dental assistant. She just happened to be talking about me that day and turns out the woman’s husband worked for a development company and they were looking for developers. Tada here I am. I had dropped tons of resumes around my area and only had a few interviews. Networking is going to be your greatest chance of being seen by other developers. Post things on social media, talk about what you enjoy doing with people, and find groups with similar interests. You can’t be found if no one knows your are looking.

From what I’ve heard from the people at my company, starting out in your job search your resume and where you have been as far as education is concerned is not nearly as important as what your portfolio looks like. That’s why FCC is so amazing. They give you projects that show off a very good range of skills that will make you marketable. People want to see what you know how to do not a piece of paper that says I went here or I completed this course. Have a good portfolio with projects you are proud of.

Once I got the job there were some definite challenges I had to overcome and quickly. I had never had to work with someone else’s code before so trying to decipher what they had written and how the program was supposed to work was a challenge. The company I work for frequently has to deal with work done by other agencies so the code I see never looks the same. People have so many different styles of coding its good to know how to read other peoples code. Whether you go on to github and just look at open source projects or even look at the many frameworks out there and see how they work. Just know how to read code as well as write it. Please comment you freaking code. It makes life so much better for everyone.

There are a ton of new and fancy frameworks out there and its always good to be up to date but make sure you have a good base. Now this will not be for all jobs but many of the projects I have worked with were not the most up to date technologies. But in the end having a good foundation in javascript is going to get you very far. So its great to be up to date with how web development evolves but make sure you have done your ground work so you can build on what you already know.

This is all my opinion obviously and I just wanted to give back to the community that helped me out so much in my journey of becoming a developer. Coding is hard but stick with it. Enjoy the process, celebrate the small victories, and work on things you like to do. Always stay positive and ask as many questions as possible. Keeping learning, staying persistent and good things will come

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Do you have a degree?

Congrats! Solid advice, thanks for sharing and enjoy your new coding job :smile:

No degree I have a FCC front-end cert and I went to an online bootcamp

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What bootcamp did you do and how did you like it?

I did Bloc and it was great for me. Very flexible around my work and gave me the mentoring help I was looking for.

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Awesome. Congrats! Link to your portfolio?

How would you weigh your learning with Bloc vs. FCC? Or what did Bloc do for you that FCC didn’t (i.e. did you get better data structure help? more required collaboration?)

I (and i’m sure many others) am weighing an online bootcamp to take me to the ‘next level,’ but it would be a financial stretch for me currently. Any additional thoughts on differences between the two would be extremely helpful.

The biggest difference for me was at Bloc you had a mentor you met with twice a week for 30 min and then could email whenever. Having the ability to ask someone questions in real time, go through your code with you, and just walk through what you are struggling with was such a game changer. FCC has great material. I was stuck with FCC projects and algorithms. As I went through my bootcamp I would come back and see how much more I could do and then if I was stuck on stuff I could as my mentor if I had asked all my bootcamp related questions. Once I finished the bootcamp I was able to get my Front-end Cert from here. Having those projects in FCC to work on was great being able to have more ways to test my skills and see what I knew. I just needed that in person time for someone to help me through the concepts that I was struggling with.

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Also here is my portfolio ted-bell.com

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Thanks, @tchbell ! I hope the job continues to be awesome!

this is great to hear!

Hi, I am new to a coding world and when I was searching some staffs, i found FCC and consequently I found ur remarkable job finding congratulation, so what I want to ask u is, will it be a good start for a totally beginner to catch up with FCC and you were saying there were real projects in the final in FCC, so will they help me to add them in my portfolio. Thank you

Congrats on your job man. I hope to get there someday.

How much does your first dev job pay?

Nice post @tchbell. Gave me some hope to be honest!

Yes, I think that FCC is a great resource for a total beginner. It gives you a very good range of skills that are looked at by employers. The projects challenge you and allow you to show off as much or as little as you want. Obviously the more you put into them the more an employer will be able to see what you can do.

Just keep grinding. It will pay off eventually.

Thanks for the insight I just started my journey 1 month and 2 weeks ago on FCC. It has been tough but fun

Thanks for the insight I just started my journey 1 month and 2 weeks ago on FCC. It has been tough but fun

Good motivation. I sincerely believe that the good break will come for a job when preparation meets opportunity.