To become Web Dev in the best way ever!

Career Advice
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Bonjour à tous :fr:
lets introduce myself first.

I am David, I have just made a big decision in my career, to learn and to work as a web developer.
Currently I graduated as a systems and networks technician.

During covid quarantine, I see a old classmate. He work as a web developer in Canada. He make me on fire to follow him and start a new career.
But I dont have the skills.

And now I have more time to devote to it.

So lets do it ! :fire:

I chose to take all of the FCC courses because a lot of people talk about it very well.
And I can see on this forum that the community is very active and helpful.

It’s just amazing !! :star_struck: :star_struck:

Because it is sure that it is a little scary to embark on this ocean of information. I found a lot of articles, websites, free courses, bootcamps, etc. But it’s too much, I’m not sure where to start.

So I’ll focus on FreeCodeCamp first.

So now, why do I need your advice.

I want to start very well, and the goal is to work as a web dev in javascript!
Get hired or find freelance assignments as quickly as possible.

  1. After which class is it nice to start personal projects and show them on my portfolio?

  2. What type of project can I push on my github profile?
    I mean, can I push every little code I do, even from FCC, or it’s better to just push my
    personnal project. You want to look good for business.

  3. How many personal projects do I need to be employable? If you have a list of good things to do.

  4. Do you think that after the FCC Javascript courses I will be able to find internship, freelance or jobs?

You guess, I just want to make the most of my time and do as much as possible but in the right way.
I feel like I need to start a personal project now, but I’m not sure if these are good ideas. Perhaps, first stay focused on the FCC courses until the end (Javascript, React ? tell me :stuck_out_tongue: ) , then start working on personal projects.

But I really don’t know :stuck_out_tongue: I need your advice.

Thank you so much.
See you.

David.

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HI @casanova.83130 !

Welcome to the forum!

Here are my thoughts :grinning:

Everybody differs with this.
Some people will wait till they finish 3 certificates or 6 before building their own projects.
For me, I chose to build personal projects alongside the curriculum.
I would finish a certificate then build a personal project and deploy the site.
It just gave me more practice and better understanding of the material.
Also, I would build small projects along the way and throw it up on codesandbox, replit or codepen.
Just for extra practice.

I like to use my github for my personal project outside of classes as well as open source projects I am working on.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with adding your class projects.
You can always archive those later.
Plus, you can just highlight the top six projects on your main profile page and employers will probably just look through those.

I don’t think there is a magic number.
I am still a junior so maybe the more experienced devs have a more detailed answer.
But I think it is more important that you have substantial projects that you can show off.
You can check out this article on some ideas to get started.

freeCodeCamp will provide with a good base knowledge of the concepts but then it is up to you to run with it and build from there.
Just keep building stuff, and that will give you a lot of practice.
Once you have some good shiny projects to show off, then try your hand at applying.
You will also need to prepare for the technical interviews with coding challenges and take home projects.
FCC has a section to practice that.

Hope that helps!

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I’d say that you should build a personal project whenever you find yourself motivated to do so. freeCodeCamp ends each curriculum section with projects. After you’ve done some of these practice projects if you go “Oh cool. Now I want to make something myself!” Then go for it. As far as portfolios go, my advice is to revisit your projects when you’re ready to start applying for jobs and ask yourself “Am I still proud of this? Does it show the quality of work I am capable of, or is this something I built as a learning exercise?”

I’m not a fan of people trying to manipulate their GitHub account to make it look like some sort of resume/portfolio. GitHub (or similar) is a tool used by developers. Use it when it makes sense to use it.

There isn’t a way to answer this. Build things that you want to build. If you just go through a bunch of set projects to create a list, it will be pretty obvious to anyone who looks at them. I’d rather talk to a candidate who has been working on one thing that they are actually interested in than someone who has a whole bunch of projects that were clearly just an exercise.

It depends on what you are doing as you go. If you are only doing the freeCodeCamp lessons and projects, probably not. If it ends up taking you a long time to get that far because you are doing things beyond the curriculum, like building your own complex projects, then maybe. To be honest though, just going as far as the end of the JavaScript portions is really about getting programming fundamentals. At that point you haven’t gotten into complex and practical projects.

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I think most of what your looking for boils down to seeking out “the right way” to learn this stuff.

There isn’t really a right way, but there are a few “wrong” ways.

A few “wrong” approaches would be:

  • trying to learn everything before moving on to the next thing, don’t there’s to much to try to be perfect act. Learn enough so you can lookup the rest later, and understand where what your learning “fits in the puzzle” relative to what you already know.

  • Making your goals “to big” and trying to tackle them directly without breaking things down. For example, you want to learn “web development” without tackling what is involved in web development. You could go even further and learn “React”, without know what React is, or what technologies are involved with React (JavaScript being the biggest one)

  • looking for a “better path”, rather than grinding out the path before you. There’s a lot to learn, it can get rough, and there will be good days and bad ones. Its not so much finding the path of the least resistance, but rather finding your way through the tougher things you end up getting stuck on.

  • not starting. Its easy to follow tutorials, watch videos, do small challenges, but you really need to build to learn to build. Doing such is the goal at the end of the day, and is how you’ll learn what you need over time. Don’t hold off on building things “until your ready”, as that time might not come for a long time (or ever) as no one is 100% ready.

If you know where your knowledge “ends”, and within what you know you have a rough idea of what you can build you can use that as a starting point and start building something.

If you know some HTML+CSS, you can make a static webpage where you sprinkle in some JS to learn a bit about that.
Or if you only know HTML, create a basic webpage and try to learn CSS on it.
Or if you know HTML+CSS+JS and maybe some jquery basics, redo the same app with React to help learn it, etc etc.

If you know none of those things, then start. The freeCodeCamp curriculum will go over those technologies to at least introduce them to you. From there you need to take it and work with them to solidify your understanding.

At the end of the day the best first step is to take a step and keep going.
Good luck keep learning, keep building!

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