I went from working in finance to being a full stack developer in 5 months with no prior coding experience.
I never liked finance and I don’t know why I chose finance/business as my major in university. I was never “passionate” about finance. I didn’t do much above the minimum required to pass through courses and to get a half-decent job.
While being bored at my job as a business analyst at a pretty big European MNC in Seoul, Korea (I’m from Finland, ended up in Korea somehow) I came across Haseeb Qureshi’s blog post on how he went from being a professional poker player to software engineer at Airbnb. I got inspired to try out coding just for fun, and I went through the Ruby track on Codecademy. I caught the coding bug. From there on I stumbled upon FCC, and after doing some research I decided that web development was the way to go. However, I didn’t have much free time available since I was working full time Asian salaryman style, but I dedicated the free time I had during mornings, evenings and weekends to working through the FCC curriculum.
4 months later my contract was due and I chose to not extend my contract. Instead, I went to South East Asia to live cheaply and code freely. I had saved up money to last for around 10 months. After one one and a half month of coding and travelling I, got eager to get some “real” work experience, or possibly an internship. I started to send out resumes to test the waters, and for one of my first applications I got a phone interview!
I somehow passed the first phone screening and I was invited for a technical assessment. I had to build a small app where you could login, add, edit and remove posts. After an epic struggle I whipped out the app, the app passed the tests, and I was invited to a third interview with the CTO. Luckily for me the CTO is a big fan of Linus Torvalds, and since we share the same country of origin, I can obviously be trusted. A few days later I got an offer + visa sponsorship and boom now I have been working as a full stack developer for one month. Next goal is to not be fired and to keep learning!
Outside resources (paid) that I learned the most from:
-The Web Developer Bootcamp course on Udemy by Colt Steele.
-All of Anthony Aliceas content on Udemy.
-1h/week tutoring from FreeCodeCamp’s own Youtube star Stephen Mayeux.
Advice:
-Don’t be afraid to invest in high quality paid content because it saves you so much time.
-Skip /don’t focus too much on jQuery.