I’m new to freeCodeCamp, I joined about a week ago but I’m loving the experience and flying through the projects! I’m currently working on my backend cert but I completed my front end in a little over a week. I’m getting lost in the projects and challenges and have found myself awake until 4am working on them. I think one of the reasons I’m working so hard, is I’m unemployed and desperately trying to find a job here in Dublin, Ireland. I do have a degree in an unrelated engineering field and experience as a bartender and I’m a former swim instructor, which our obviously big pluses, but I’m really unsure of how to show employers that I know what I’m doing. Does the freeCodeCamp front-end certification on my resume hold enough weight to get me a job.
If anybody has been in a similar situation and were successful in getting a job; with previous unrelated experience and only self-taught coding experience on their resume, I’d love to see how they stated that on their resume.
I know there are jobs out there, I’m just not sure how to draw attention to my resume over everybody else.
Thanks ahead of time, and feel free to check out my codepen portfolio for some of my projects,
I’m just a very fast learner and am currently unemployed. I wake up…go to Starbucks and work for 8 hours non stop, then return home have dinner and work for another 6-7 hours in the evening. I basically have a very small amount of savings and so the faster I learn and the more I build my portfolio and knowledge the faster I can get a job and stop living off my savings.
Damn dude, keep on trucking. I unfortunately can’t help much as I am still in the “wake up go to starbucks phase.” But if you keep making projects to showcase that will definitely help which is what I’m trying to do. I wish the best of luck to you.
Thank you! Same to you! The first few days are the worst. It’s all work no gain until you start to get to the projects and realize how much you can do!
it is quite possible. I have read a few posts on this forum, where people got a job after completing the front-end certificate. However I would strongly suggest you get familiar with a front-end framework. React is pretty popular and very much in demand.
If I were in your position I would do the following:
Make a portfolio (example). Doesn’t have to been too fancy for starters, but its pretty much a must have. It is more important than a degree to be honest.
Make a CV. But don’t just make a regular CV from an universal template. Make it stand out. In fact I would recommend you take the same approach to designing your CV as you would a website. That way it becomes memorable to the guy reading it and it also speaks to your ability to design. This website has a bunch of templates you can use for inspiration. It comes with a horrible editor for those templates, but its also has a free version, so its actually pretty decent overall.
(At this point you can probably already start sending out applications)
I mentioned front-end frameworks earlier. There is a section in the Visualization Certification called React projects. Do those. They are solid projects. It doesn’t really matter if you pick React. You could very well do them with Angular or Vue. Its up to you to choose a framework, though I am a fan of React and I would recommend it. Also make them as actual projects and put them on github or another online repository. Don’t use codepen. That way you show you know version control, which is again a plus.
Yeah, well there are maybe a thousand other things you could do but this post is already getting pretty long. Perhaps the important thing to remember is that a degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering isn’t defining. So if you have:
a portfolio page
all the front-end certificate projects
all the React projects
you are well ahead of any graduate who just finished their education and doesn’t have any of those.
Thanks for your reply! I’m actually really understand the github comment. I haven’t had much experience with github yet, and would love to move all my code pen projects there. However from what I’ve seen I can’t see a way to preview the projects, it just shows the code, if I want somebody to be able to preview it, can that also be done on github? Perhaps that’s a stupid question?
As for CV and portfolio, I’m definitely working on both of those. My portfolio website is running at georgeowenkemp.com and I’m slowly working on my CV. I’ll definitely look at React, although i might go with Angular as it seems more popular here in Dublin, based on my job research so far.
Thanks again, I really appreciate your encouragement and advice.
You are right. You can’t preview it directly on github, however they can clone (download) your repository and run the project themselves. However you have a point. A preview might be a better way to go about it. You can either host the project on the same server as your portfolio or I guess you can also make a codepen version for a quick preview. Though codepen doesn’t really work well for bigger projects. Plunker might be better, but I haven’t used it at all.
I don’t know if you can access my github profile, but for some of my projects I’ve also uploaded them to heroku, so people can see a live version of them on there and I put a link of them on my read me file. Both Github and Heroku give really good step by step instruction on how to upload your files and if you have any issues there are really good resources online that will walk you through it as well.
Well my first coding job (which ended badly after 3 months), I got without having an updated CV - someone saw my portfolio and invited me to interview.
So for my proper coding job that I have now, on my CV I included the following on there which related to what I had built myself:
Portfolio completed featuring 12 responsive websites using a variety of popular languages/frameworks, alongside modern techniques such as CSS Flexbox – www.iwillbeawebdeveloper.co.uk.
Deployed Drupal as a CMS for www.ubereadoolische.com – installing and configuring appropriate modules, blocks and uploading content.
