Over the past few years, I have been on disability income. In the meantime, I have been studying and coding to become a web developer. I have been working on this diligently for around 3 years now.
Right now, I still live at home. My family’s financial situation is not good, and my father recently had to take over my car to use himself.
I am just seeking opportunties, yet I am struggling to find them with my current skillset.
Hey man, sorry about your situation really. What advice would you like to get? Maybe some people could help you out here.
@lezojeda just some feedback I guess on what I can do. Maybe some good ideas? Idk.
I am skilled in a multitude of technologies, yet I lack with frontend JS frameworks.
Hi,
Sorry to hear about your situation. I can understand that it’s difficult to maintain positivity when you don’t see the result of your diligent effort.
Do you mean that you don’t know anything about frontend JS frameworks, or your skills are not high enough to qualify for a job?
Sorry to hear about your situation brother.
If your financial condition is really bad, I’ll advise you to grab any sort of job out web development to bear your family expenses and with a full time job make some time out for learn coding. Once you develop particular skills in coding then switch job to a full time web developer. To get any sort of thing once need to keep patience and keep hard work as well.
Good luck for your future. (Y)
I call shenanigans on yellow pages
What have you tried so far? It might help us pinpoint some good directions to go if you let us know where you are at. Have you applied to jobs but they don’t contact you back? What websites have you used to apply? Where are you looking? If you are looking to get cash faster, then I think I agree that you will have to cold call businesses and offer your services. However, if you are looking to get a job we will probably give more advice towards applying, interviewing, etc. Also, what are your current skillsets?
I am skilled in the following:
Here is my github account:
My best work on there is probably JS_QUIZZES_3
I have a linkedIn also. I have been looking and applying for positions. Have not received a call back from any.
Upwork is no success.
One guy may be offering me a junior position, but it is not until next year and there is no guarantees.
Do you have any experience with a js framework? Love them or hate them, a lot of jobs are centered around them. It might be good to pick up something like React or Angular (I would not suggest Vue until more jobs pop up but it’s one of my favorites). The problem with platforms like Upwork is that you don’t get many clients from them. You generally have to go out and find those clients. Then, have them go through Upwork to improve your reviews and get better stats to attract organic work. I would contact those places that you have applied and check in with them. Basically, in your own words, say something along the lines of, “Hello [Business / Owner], I sent you an application to the [specific job position they posted about]. Have you been able to review it? I would love to further discuss my qualifications.” Then, if they respond that they “went another route” then probe them further about why (be nice and super professional about it). This will help you with future jobs. If they are not allowed to say why, oh well. But it is worth asking! Feedback is super important. Otherwise, you are just throwing a paper airplane, while blindfolded, into the wind onto a lily pad in the ocean from the airplane (a bit of hyperbole but you get the point). This will greatly improve your chances. It may be a rough start but it will work. I would not rely on the guy that might give you a junior position. Sounds too flaky. Also, building a better portfolio will most likely help you as well.
@allon-z
I have had a hell of a time picking up a frontend JS library/framework for years now. That has been my weakness. I can build basic todo lists in react, but that is as far as it goes. Building medium to large size apps in a JS framework is just not doable for me, at least not right now. State management is extremely difficult for anything larger than a todo app. Redux to me is a nightmare.
It would be nice to have state (the component data) in one or more files and just include them, like with a require/import statement and then just call setState from there. None of this “reducers” crap.
Honestly, state management is one of the hardest parts. But the reducer is super important because they control what the actions do to the state. The reducers are not even given to the components. It seems convoluted but it is the best way to separate concerns in my opinion.
I totally get that they are annoying. But a necessary evil if you are using React for medium to large applications. I would just practice like crazy. But maybe that’s besides the point of this discussion.
Honestly, I know how hard it is to look for jobs. I am currently looking for one myself. But if you have specific jobs you are looking for, then I would highly focus on getting projects for your portfolio that would impress those employers.
Try to work on an existing codebase. I learned React, but at my job they use Vue. I still don’t fill understand it, but I get tasked with adding features and fixing bugs. And I can figure it out slowly via following the error messages as I mess around.
Building a project from scratch doesn’t have to be the only way to show you have experience with a framework. And depending on the company, it’s not necessary that that is something you’ll be expected to be able to do.
Sounds to me you are overengineering your thought process in handling state, my suggestion is to just put all state related to all your components to the root and only have a different state if necessary. You should not worry about prop drilling.
Prop drilling isn’t bad for personal projects unless you are talking about 50 + components. I have built a react app for a client in a team of 5 before and it’s fairly large, so its definately doable. Redux has been a debatable topic on whether it reduces complexity, i know a company that only turn to redux only if there are issues with normal react and that is only 6 months after the project has started.
Other than that , just keep learning and building stuff and dont stop , you can also check out
https://www.chingu.io/ to meet people and build projects together in your free time
What particular skills are exactly necessary to get a front-end developer job?
Try Angular,
and about your projects, big or small doesn’t matter, try to deploy them somewhere to be available live when you go to interviews so you can show them imediately.
Above everything, change your state of mind, I’ve read your comments, focus on what you can do and not viceversa. Good luck.
As someone who sometimes is asked to review profile of possible candidates at work, my first advice for you is to polish your Github, since I assume that when you apply, you also link your GH profile.
I did pretty much what I would do to a candidate:
open some project on the home
none of them had a README, so I have no idea what kind of project I am looking at.
How it works, what it should do, and so on…
And you can’t expect any recruiter / tech to take time to navigate around your source code to read it.
Sorry to sound harsh,
and don’t get me wrong, my GH profile is full of “Work in progress” and half/done projects…
that i usually finish one month before applying to new jobs 
That’s how you know someone is looking for a new job 
I’m sorry to hear you’re broke and I was there myself. I know this is difficult but consider a developer job at our slightly above minimum wage. The reason for such a crazy move is that it immediately helps the financials without compromising your learning. Secondly learn angular not react. Buy udemy course that teaches angular because it is definitely the harder language to learn that conveys your ability to code and deploy in an enterprise level framework.
Third I would only learn php if your job uses it. Not because it’s a bad language to learn but because you should spend your time on angular, node and js
Sorry about your financial situation. Some of us started far worse because we could not even afford to have a car.
Having gone through the comments here, I can see members of this great community already gave so many nice suggestions that could help out.
The only addition I intend to add is that you should pick the most important thing that would yield the greatest ROI on your finances and work on it first.
The reason why it seems you are doing much but getting less is that you are trying to do multiple things at a time.
Focus on the most important thing and ignore everything else for now.
I currently do back end for Timbu and also run some freelance gig on fiverr. If you need help as regards freelancing, let me know.