So I’ve completed everything, earned all my certificates, and am now on my way to the non-profit projects.
But how else can I gain experience? Is there any other place that can get me the experience I need (such as working on non-profit projects) or can at least set me on the right path?
Also, what else do I need to learn before I go out into the “real world?” Are things like PHP and Ruby on Rails essential to learn?
Thank you for your time
Hey congrats on earning all the certificates! That’s impressive.
You might as well jump on the ML and blockchain bandwagons - I’m sure those technologies will be useful in your web dev career at some point.
So where would you recommend to start learning those technologies? Are there any courses I can take to start learning them?
There are countless resources, and I don’t know what the best are for blockchain.
I did bookmark a good article that highlighted various ML learning resources:
Every single Machine Learning course on the internet, ranked by your reviews
Would ML and blockchain be critical in learning Web Development? Since that’s what I’m working towards.
I would recommend really polishing your projects and portfolio.
Are the accessible?
Are they secure?
Are they fast?
Are they visually appealing?
Are they semantic?
Do they follow sensible and consistent coding conventions?
If you can tighten up all of these things, all you then need to do is networking and applying for jobs.
These may help. Design and Colors.
Some devops may be useful, setting up web server, docker, and the like.
Accessibility Guidelines.
Other frameworks… Material, Angular, Vue.
Couldn’t hurt to learn and become familiar with WordPress, Joomla, etc. Download and setup a virtual environment, using AMPPS. http://ampps.com/
No they are not critical at all - I was just suggesting them as something else to learn as these are becoming prevalent and might be interesting to learn, and would definitely add an edge to your abilities. As others mentioned after me, polishing up your current skills is a great idea. You can never know enough of your current skills.
Okay. Thanks for the help!
The lovely and talented @P1xt has created a couple “Job Ready” guides with additional resources, projects, and subjects. They can be found on her GitHub here. You’ll notice that there are several variations, depending on your goals.
That is the best guide ever!
For what to do next, I’d say try to learn the development process, techniques, technologies, methods, etc that most companies use.
The code camp is great for learning technical stuff, but without the correct procedures you’ll have a hard time finding a job. A really, really hard time.
So better learn about Agile methods, version control systems such as GIT, repositories for those vcs such as GitHub, task runners such as GULP, CSS standardisation methods like BEM (/ OOCSS / SMACSS), HTML pre-processors like Pug and CSS pre-processors like SASS, software architecture / patterns, etc
Try fiddling some code at services like CodePen, those are great tools to show what you can do, and it can work as a sort of portfolio as well. I know I would value a decent CodePen profile much higher than yet another generic non-profit website.
If your only approach to coding has been through the camp, I’m sure by now you know A LOT of stuff, but to me the biggest missing piece here is the how to do it. So I’d say focus on that.
As for PHP and Ruby, it depends on where you want to focus. They are great tools, but definitely not needed if you want to ride the Front End Developer route. If you really, really want to know some new coding stuff, definitely go with React, which is probably the most demanded front end skill. Vue es trending like crazy too, and Angular 2/4/5 is a valid option too.
For more of a backend oriented profile you must know by now about MongoDB and Node.js, which are in much higher demand than PHP or Ruby. So in your place I’d focus on that stack. But to each his own.
Going “full stack” is totally valid, but not the best approach imho. Try specialising and let teamwork do the rest.
Congrats on earning all those certificates, impressive stuff!
Skip most of the math. Waste of time.
The world is your oyster. Egghead.io, medium.com, udemy, podcasts, wesbos, watchandcode, teamtreehouse, codeschool, frontendmasters, and upload lots of good apps on codepen and git. Work on MERN or MEAN stack if that is your thing.
Multi-boot your OS with a linux distro (not recommended with pentesting distros) or even better compile arch, gentoo, funtoo, slackware, Debian, Fedora, OpenSuse, CentOS, RHEL, and/or sabayon. Work on JSX, ES6 and ES7 with javascript frameworks. Use chef, puppet, heroku, salt, ansible, aws, vagrant, etc. to host your frontend. Work on backend more express, yarn, (webserverforchrome, “insert packagemanager or language/framework of your choice”) to make a local simplehttpserver (live-server) that updates the dom when you save your code), mongobd atlas, mongoDB lab, couchDB, redis, d3, sql, graphql, graphx, etc.) to connect frontend. Use and/or understand why you would use a relational vs non relational database, and on using REST and CRUD.
Use CSS grid, a css complier, flex, react/redux, bootstrap, etc. to easily make the frontend a full forum, login authentication (passport, api social network authentication, firebase, nginx, adonis, etc), full blog, full tribute page, and add a separate about me page which is your portfolio, which are all functioning within one full website. No more static one page website with just a navbar that drops down to certain sections of the page. Work on a meaningful app/website that helps displaced communities or fulfills a need. Do things for small companies or nonprofits.
Have senior people do code reviews on you and you start learning how to do one as well. In creating larger projects you will end up with (a lot) of .js files. For example one for eventsModule, dataModule, UIModule, etc… Find more libraries, spell checker, prettier, beautify, indent-rainbow, rainbow brackets, bracket pair colorizer, color highlight, output colorizer, vs color picker, auto close tag, auto rename tag, auto complete tag, better comments, emmet, (several variations of lent), flow, typescript, (several variations of intellisense), babel, webpack, mocha, gulp, grunt, etc. Add maps, weather, gis, and geocaching type APIs. Get good at using the terminal and shortcuts in your text editor, IDE, and/or OS, but do not limit yourself to just one just in case you have an employer that forces you to only use one.
Use a sketch/marvel/gravito/visio/blender/libreoffice draw, or a similar UX design tool to preplan your app (get good at prototyping and making sections of your code read only/private), get good at gimp or photoshop. Make landing page of different popular econ sites and social networks. Look into making a node or python/beautiful soup webscraper, and using 80legs, bit.ly, shorturl, spark/hadoop, R, scala, excel, sql, DevOps, docker, agile, etc. for backend analytics. Learn the many types of algorithms when and why they should be used. Use algorithms in your app/website and let people who inquire why you are using that. Work on selectors, constructors, prototypes, promises, pagination searches with databases, loops within arrays, and different types of math randoms.
Take charge of being PM in a group at a coding meetup. Be nice be nice be nice and network like crazy. There will be a lot of people who naturally will not like you. Do not worry. Keep going to meet ups even if you do not have a laptop and you only have a budget PC. If you need to take a noise canceling headset with you if you have anxiety issues, do it. That is what I am trying to do.
One more thing when you start to get a lot of praise be humble, because it is too easy for people to view you as egotistical and/or be envious and poof…there goes your network opportunities.
I don’t agree with skipping the math, last place I was working on we had a lot of function compositions, it was slowing down the whole app because we didn’t have optimized algorithms to make it work. An extra course on algorithms and data structures could be helpfull. Also learning SQL is really important, there are some good resources around:
For algorithms this was the easiest to follow up as it uses JS: https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algorithms/binary-search/a/running-time-of-binary-search
For DB’s: https://www.coursera.org/learn/database-management/home/welcome
When you feel ready you can try building sites for close people, I told my dentist an idea I had for a product and he’s interested, freelancing can give some good experience and maybe feed you for a while xD.
Hi, I am really interested to know what kind of certifications you earned, so that I could help you better in this.
I know, starting out as a web developer is very confusing but if you chose this path for the sheer passion of creating new things, your path will be clear.
Glad to hear you want to learn more. And yes, you should learn PHP and Ruby. PHP is one of the Basic server side scripting languages. Most websites that you see today is developed with PHP, it so easy to learn and less complicated. Even facebook was developed in PHP at the initial stage.
If you aren’t familiar with PHP I suggest you make it as the next step in your path.
What Jackson Bates said.
Put all your projects into here, here, here and here:
https://tools.pingdom.com/
https://observatory.mozilla.org/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
https://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input
Then fix any problems they find.