What to focus on after learning the basics

I’m trying to get a web developer job and I’m wondering the next best step to take.

So far I’ve learnt some computer science - make my own tries, hash tables, balanced binary trees, network flows etc. I’ve also learn html css javascript, typescript, C#, SQL and the .net framework and made a full stack app from scratch.

But despite this I’m not hearing back from any of my applications.

Should I make more projects? Look for freelancing work? Learn more cs? Or something else.There aren’t many jobs in my area and they’re all looking for people with degrees or previous work experience.

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Have you tried networking like meet-ups, Slack and Discord?

Also you could build projects and sites for friends and family as a way of getting more experience.

I’d recommend this book collection for you to dive deeper into C# & .Net

wow, nice! i love it

If you need experience, then go out and get that experience

The simplest thing you can do is go out and build more things and apply to more jobs, even ones outside of your area. (You can always back out of any job if they ask you to relocate, but its great to say “yes” when they do ask regardless, just to get further along the process)

Now I say “go out and build more things” and there’s a lot of ways to about this. The easiest is think of something, anything to build and go out and learn how to build it. Since you already have made a full stack app from scratch, maybe do it again, but add more new technologies (socket.io?) frameworks (instead of React, maybe use Angular?) or methods (use test driven development). Just build something to learn something. Odds are you will run into issues (I’m sure you ran into some when you did your first app, which is totally normal) make it as impressive as you can, and add it all into github so you can “show it off”.

Now building something for the sake of building something is fine, but you could go out and find potential clients and ask them if you could do free work for them. For example, you can go to a local library and say your a junior developer and would like to offer your services to do something for them as volunteer work. Odds are you can help them somehow, just be prepared to do something you might not want to do, or let someone else make some decisions for your (the library staff will give you the requirements, just like actual work :smiley:)

Obviously you can go do freelance work and get paid, but you will have to spend time and effort getting those jobs. Your welcome to try and you might get some jobs, but if you take the “free volunteer route” there is a lot less pressure, and you can probably get a lot more flexibility on the project, and provide more input. Most freelance work is mainly about getting work done for cheap, or very specific jobs for cheap.

Finally, your welcome to learn more CS at any time as a developer, but it’s hard to show that you learned the topics without a degree, and as such I wouldn’t recommend focusing on the idea learning just to learn, you learn to do, and the best way to learn is to do!, so you can kind of see it as a cycle haha.

PS. Overall it sounds like your probably past the basic concepts, since you could have 0 idea of computer science topics and still be able to build a full stack app haha. Having those fundamentals is a great thing to have, since they impact almost all kinds of development you do.

Goodluck, keep building :smiley:

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i"m new on this app so what will i do

Hi @ayomidimeji,
start with doing the various paths on FCC (obviously depends on your knowledge of programming)
Practice until you understand a concept (if you don’t understand certain logic or syntax you can always ask here).
I hope I was helpful :robot:

Check out some job descriptions and see if you can fill their needs at about 30-40% or what they require. Look at the technologies they use. WeWorkRemotely and angel(dot)co can be valiable in finding whats valuable.

Thanks for all the great advice everyone. I’m going to start doing to free lance work for a small fee in order to get some more experience and things to add to my portfolio. The other option is a bootcamp but I’d prefer not to if I don’t need to.