Hello everybody

So I just finished my first month of being a professional web developer and I just wanted to share my thoughts and tips for those who are still looking for jobs and want to be prepared.

As far as getting the job is concerned I found my job from my girlfriends dental assistant. She just happened to be talking about me that day and turns out the woman’s husband worked for a development company and they were looking for developers. Tada here I am. I had dropped tons of resumes around my area and only had a few interviews. Networking is going to be your greatest chance of being seen by other developers. Post things on social media, talk about what you enjoy doing with people, and find groups with similar interests. You can’t be found if no one knows your are looking.

From what I’ve heard from the people at my company, starting out in your job search your resume and where you have been as far as education is concerned is not nearly as important as what your portfolio looks like. That’s why FCC is so amazing. They give you projects that show off a very good range of skills that will make you marketable. People want to see what you know how to do not a piece of paper that says I went here or I completed this course. Have a good portfolio with projects you are proud of.

Once I got the job there were some definite challenges I had to overcome and quickly. I had never had to work with someone else’s code before so trying to decipher what they had written and how the program was supposed to work was a challenge. The company I work for frequently has to deal with work done by other agencies so the code I see never looks the same. People have so many different styles of coding its good to know how to read other peoples code. Whether you go on to github and just look at open source projects or even look at the many frameworks out there and see how they work. Just know how to read code as well as write it. Please comment you freaking code. It makes life so much better for everyone.

There are a ton of new and fancy frameworks out there and its always good to be up to date but make sure you have a good base. Now this will not be for all jobs but many of the projects I have worked with were not the most up to date technologies. But in the end having a good foundation in javascript is going to get you very far. So its great to be up to date with how web development evolves but make sure you have done your ground work so you can build on what you already know.

This is all my opinion obviously and I just wanted to give back to the community that helped me out so much in my journey of becoming a developer. Coding is hard but stick with it. Enjoy the process, celebrate the small victories, and work on things you like to do. Always stay positive and ask as many questions as possible. Keeping learning, staying persistent and good things will come

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Thanks for sharing. Reading other’s code really helps. :grinning: