What next steps should I take?

Hey, I wanna be a fullstack developer; With that being said I of course need to learn front end and then move towards backend. I have a pretty decent grasp upon the fundamentals of how HTML and JS work together in the web page and I also am doing a little bit of node.js. Now, With me preferenencing my question: What next steps should I take so I can maybe get an internship by 16? I’m currently 15. Or even a job! I’m just trying to concentrate my skills. My family is very supportive and I’m doing it in my free time, I just want to get a grasp on what I need to get done with I already know.

Obviously making some projects and watching tutorials, will maybe help but I don’t wanna enter the tutorial hell where I only know how to use the concepts taught in the videos and never retain the information.

First, make sure it’s actually legal to get a job at your age. Many companies wont hire anyone until they are 18. Many more will only hire those with a few years of experience (from school or otherwise).

Getting an internship, where you can learn more, might be more reasonable, but do check the laws in your area.

Next, there is of course the “long term view” of investing in yourself. The single best investment is actually going to higher education for this stuff. There, you will learn more skills, and gain access to resources that are designed to directly lead you into companies doing this sort of stuff.

Practical skills are important, but they aren’t everything. A holistic, general approach usually helps the most in the long-term.

However, this is obviously only an option if available. If you don’t have the time or money to commit to such approaches, there are alternates, but the become vastly more risky and stressful.

The quickest way out/away from tutorial hell is to not use a tutorial at all. Tutorials will show you what you can learn, and general ideas of what you can do. But they wont show you everything, nor can they. They wont show you all the possible ways you can screw things up, nor can they show you how to fix all those ways. Those issues, and problems you run into are what experiences is made up of. The only way to get that experience, is to jump in.

With that said, if you know HTML and JS (and I assume CSS?) then look to combine those to build something using those. If you don’t know what you can build, I’d google around, but I’d consider knowing the limitations of what you know just as important as actually knowing.

It’s one thing to try to know everything, its another to know what you know and don’t know. With that context, you can go out and learn more of that “don’t know” stuff.

Knowing how to combine what you’ve learned to build stuff should be done often, and continuously. There’s always more to learn, but you want to make sure you know how to put into practice what you’ve already learned.

Regardless of what sort of future you’re looking into, keep up the good work, have fun, keep building keep learning :+1:

2 Likes

Massive respect! Having a goal, a supporting network and a plan, sounds like you’re doing things exactly right.

Tutorials and lessons are great, to a point. There comes a time when you kick off those training wheels, and venture into live projects. Might be getting involved with an open source github project you believe in, or coming up with some of your own. After you’ve built things for which you have a pre-made plan (tutorials), then getting involved in projects where there is no plan yet or where the plan is evolving? Another level of education.

After that, look around you. Are there restaurants or businesses nearby that could benefit from a new or updated web presence? At 16, even if you can’t work in some places, you can start your own small design studio.

Might start with looking at places that don’t have a site at all, and doodling ideas. Or look at places that have a site, but the age or amateur look is hurting them more than helping. If they have a site, why do you think it might not be attracting as much business as it could? What small changes could you make to significantly improve the user experience?

You or your friends might enjoy some apps, but experience frustration with parts. Might be fun to team-build an app, from brainstorming and challenging each others ideas t to storyboarding.

With the knowledge you have, you could do a lot right where you are (both locally and in the remote dev community). And doing things like that will help place you head and shoulders higher when internships come along.

1 Like

Thank you for clearing the air on some of my questions; I am currently also in AP classes and honors. I have been slowly learning more javascript and HTML whilst still in school. (I’m a freshman btw) I did mention that I have a lot of stuff I didn’t know, Because, It’s true .it’s mainly my own sorta way of keeping myself humble and continuing to learn on a schedule that works with my everyday life.

I keep a sort of mental checklist(?) that I work on every day after school. I’m currently getting better at HTML with Javascript and Node.js at the same time. I’m actually making a bot UI with express! I haven’t touched a single tutorial yet and have just slowly been working on it. So far I’m about 25% of the way done with what I wanna do with said project.

I’m learning new stuff every day and also making sure my grades don’t suffer as a result.

Also:

Should I learn Golang or python for more backend-oriented coding or should I ask elsewhere?

Well I recently (As stated in the other reply) Started my first project I have a lot of moving parts and I’m starting to enjoy development as a whole! I plan to get good at the parts of web development I need to get good at then move to another language i.e: Python or Golang(I’m very interested in Golang). Then learning to make more software-level projects as well.

I’m slowly moving towards my goal as the spark for learning to code started when I was like 10 lol, So, I’m finally learning to do it and avoiding burnout as I have a friend who does full-stack development that’s kind of mentoring me. I also may start emailing businesses to see if maybe I can make them a site for a small commission fee.

I’d stick with nodejs until you get a better grasp of express+JavaScript in general. You’d want to make sure you have a solid grasp on the syntax and how to use that syntax to solve problems.

If you want to branch out and learn another language, and those are your two choices your curious about I’d look into GoLang rather than Python.

Python is more popular, and is one of the most taught languages due to its clear and readable syntax, but the language itself is very similar to JavaScript in what its used for, how its written, and how its ran. This is especially true if your comparing JavaScript and nodejs.

On the flip side Go, or GoLang, is a compiled statically typed language. This means it used, written, and ran differently than nodejs or Python. Meaning you’d learn more about languages, and their differences looking into GoLang.

Go is similar to Python in its readability, but its goals are different. Where Python is known to be kinda slow due to being interpreted, and nodejs known to be completely limited in some cases (its single threaded), Go is made for speed. Its more or less the modern take on C (one of the oldest languages still widely used today).

So if those are the 2 next on your list, I’d look into Go. I’d also stick with learning nodejs+JavaScript, as no matter how questionable JavaScript is, it still is the language of the web, and thus is very important if your interested in web development.

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.