Really happy to share some great news with the community, now there is one more employed self-taught dev! It was quite a surreal experience to get a job offer after just 5 months of study and almost no project experience, but I’m super excited about what’s going to happen next.
If anyone’s interested, I kept a diary of things I studied and how long it took me, and if you’re interested, just pm me and I can send you the diary. It’s not very neatly organised, but keeps it very detailed.
Just wanted to say massive thank you to the community, creators, contributors and @QuincyLarson and for your participation and helpful advice. It was amazing to gain a lot of inspiration from all the self-starters on the forum.
I’ve always been thinking about ways to give back to the community for what I got, and one idea came to my mind. There are a lot of guides on how to get a job, but very few posts about what happens when you get it. Mostly memories of experienced developers and we usually tend to smooth things over after a period of time. And since my job starts on 2nd October, I thought that possible it could be created daily. A single path, how it’s experienced. Challenges and tasks and the rest.
Tweeting daily and if needed will be posting longer material on Medium.
Connect with me on Twitter or Medium for longer posts: @michael_mynah.
Thank you all so much again, and wish you all the luck in all of your pursuits!
UPD:
Here’s my medium post about how I studied, the diary link can be found there.
Do you have a portfolio site we can check out? I like to measure how close I am to being employable by seeing the sites of people who recently got hired.
Congratulations! I’m still pretty new to all of this, so it’s great to hear that somebody self-taught (with the help of FCC, of course!) can make something amazing happen with enough effort! Looking forward to your progress. Good luck!
Sure, it’s junior web dev, very entry level. I’ll start on the front-end, and gradually study to be full-stack (javascript, c#). My main focus in finding a job was to find somewhere where people are looking for someone to grow in their own team. That’s not that uncommon in the UK, at least it seems to me.
I started with studying Python, as I wanted to get a grasp the basic concepts with very little language imposed limitations. I do have a degree, but in Aerospace, you could probably say that I wasn’t a complete beginner, we studied how to multiply matrices using Fortran.
Honestly, no one even asked me for my portfolio or my github page. I’ve been asked to solve two simple tasks on interviewzen. It records your screen as you code, and then phone interview and then face-to-face. I don’t think I have a secret, just tried to be me, used best practices I’ve learnt (as well as I could), think aloud and try to avoid turning the interview into a KGB style interrogation of yourself - we have a conversation, rather than i’m being asked questions (but that’s something I’ve been doing even before getting this job)
Congratulations on getting your first developer job!
I am now following you on Twitter, and am looking forward to reading about your first few weeks on the job, and what you learn in the process. You’re right that “what to do after you get a developer job” is a topic that few have covered, and all of us would benefit from reading.
Thank you. I started writing an article on medium where I highlight the things and try to explain the diary itself as it’s really a bit of a mess. But if you’re interested to look at it in its raw form, please follow the link.
