Posts like this really encouraged me in the past year, so I want to add my own.
TL;DR I started learning to program a little over a year ago. I have a MA in a complete different field and wanted to switch careers. After internship, 32 job applications, 9 phone interviews, and 4 in person interviews I just accepted my first time position as a developer.
I can’t thank both reddit and freecodecamp enough for the past year. I started a bit over a year ago on this journey of learning, and fell in love with it. I started with codeacademy, but ended up switching because while it was cool to learn some concepts, I wasn’t actually learning how to use a text editor or other real tools, or wasn’t learning how projects fit together. On March 31, 2016 I started down the freecodecamp route. I trudged along for around 9 months until I approached a startup asking for an internship. Graciously the accepted and put me to work for 5 months. I still worked full time, and would work early in the am before work and in the pm after work. I averaged about 25 hours a week with them. It sucked, but I’ve so grateful for that time. There are so many things that I have no idea how I would have learned had it not been for our tech lead taking the time and walking me through them.
During the last month of my internship I started applying for jobs. I shot out 32 applications, got 9 phone interviews, and 4 in person. I honestly don’t get how hiring goes in this field as some of the ones I thought I bombed they asked me back and some that I thought I did great at I never heard back from them. Earlier this week I accepted an offer as a full time web developer. After a lot of struggle, early mornings and late nights, I’m so excited for this. I’m really excited, but equally nervous to start.
very well done … hope it goes well for you … any chance you would talk about what you did/learned in your internship … what were some of your interviews like and what you expect to be doing in your new job eg is it for fullstack or just frontend or just backend.
again great news and its great encouragement for the rest of us trying to do the same.
Congratulations! You will be great!
Congratulations. Thanks for sharing.
For sure. Before my internship I hadn’t coded in php at all. It was the first time that I moved from js to something else. It was incredible to see how much of your general knowledge transfers from one language to another. The work in my internship ranged from setting up vagrants to hosting on aws to style. I was able to work on the full stack which I’m really thankful for. Some things that I don’t know how I would have learned are like ssh’ing or just getting big concepts explained to me. One of the things my tech lead did was also draw out diagrams of concepts and large features before we started building. It actually caused me to buy a white board.
As for job interviewing, I was surprised at how much my portfolio didn’t play into the decision. I don’t have an impressive github or website. However, I felt like I was able to answer questions like, “What is MVC” well. One thing that was hard from me was working full-time, interviewing, and doing my internship. I felt like if I was preparing for a job interview I wasn’t getting work done on my internship, if I worked on my internship, it was time I could have spent preparing. It really was a balancing act.
Hope that helps!
Hello!
Posts like this are really encouraging! Just one question: How old are you?
I’m asking because I’m experiencing a similar but different situation. I’m 35yo I just left my position as marketing manager in a startup, and I wanted to switch careers. I started to develop websites couple of years ago, as a hobby. First using WYSIWYG, then using opensource such as Prestashop and Wordpress. so I have some knowledge of HTML, PHP, SQL, but very ‘basic’. But I love to code!
I just started freeCodeCamp, and I feel very confident with my odds seeing posts like yours.
Good Luck
Regards;
I’m in my late 20’s. Keep at it, you can totally do it. I see stories of people on reddit that have gone through the same process and have 10 years on you.