I am curious because I want to know if there is a set number of hours that people will answer.
It depends on you, your comfort with coding, your goals, etc. There is no single answer.
Personally, I spend 40+ hours a week, but I’m lucky enough to be in a situation where I am getting paid to learn more about C, software, and math.
@noblegas87, When I was learning to code and trying to break into the industry, I was also working a full time job. I spent about 2/3 hours every night after work coding. And maybe around 4-5 hours on the weekend.
I did this for about 3 months. I then decided to quit my job and focus full time on learning to code. I was coding/learning for about 8-9 hours a day for the next 9-10 months.
Now i’m working as a developer. How much time you set aside to code/learn depends on how much time you’re willing to sacrifice. You have 24 hours a day, what you do with it is your call
All the best!
what did you do typically within those 8 hours ? What was your schedule typically like?
Building stuff from scratch (vanilla CSS, and js). Taking udemy courses, watching YouTube tutorials Reading and diving deep and getting lost in MDN. Breaking lots of stuff, getting frustrated at why things don’t work.
I didn’t come up with a set schedule. But I came up with a list of things to build, list of things to learn that I knew I had to learn to be able to land a job. And everyday I slowly chip away at that list.
If you want to build your own list, I suggest you start looking at developer job descriptions at your location. They are more or less structured in the same way and they list down all the things you should be familiar with to get a job. Work backwards from there. Example,
Front end developer role:
- experience with JavaScripte and at least familiar with one frontend framework/library (eg. React, Angular, Vue)
- familiar with Git
Etc etc etc.
So what do you do? You start learning React JS. But you soon find out you should be well versed with ES6 syntax otherwise you’ll be really lost with React.
So you plan on learning ES6 first and work on any foundations that are needed along the way.
So work backwards and plan your own journey. Set goals daily, eg focus on understanding Promises and how to use them in conjunction with the fetch API
And yeah if you’re looking to follow a curriculum, freecodecamp is a curriculum that you can/should follow. But dive deep. Freecodecamp is the number one place to help you get your feet wet on all topics. But it’s on you to really go through stackoverflow, MDN, build and break things so that you really have a solid mental model.
Hope that helps!
If anyone’s interested, this is the list I had. You may or may not understand everything that’s written there and some of them may be termed wrongly because I wasn’t well versed in the lingo when I was first starting out. But I built/watched/ and learned as much as I could on all these topics
To build:
- create collapsed navigation bar
- create smooth scrolling
- create Navigation highlighting when at the right content
- use a lighweight JS framework for scrollspy
- Sticky Navigation
- shrinking and disappearing/appearing Nav on scroll
- create a custom drop down menu
- create an accordian FAQ section
-create custom checkbox and radio button - create a custom toggle button
- create a image slider/gallery
- Create a testimonial slider
- Create a slider where user can swipe to switch images using mouse or touch
- parallex effect
- responsive design with flexbox
Courses:
- FCC
- Wesbos JS30
- Web developer bootcamp (advanced and non-advanced version) Udemy
Computer Science:
-
Havard CS50
-
Havard CS100
-
AJAX/Fetch/Axios/XML
-
Basic React/ JSX
To learn:
- Javascript plus…
– ES6
– Async and await
– promises - APIs, keys and tokens , OAuth
- CORS
- Testing with Jasmine or Chai or Jest
- Node JS
- Express
Time spent on learning/working/studying/whatever isn’t all made equal. You could spend 40 hours a week learning less than spending 10 hours a week learning.
Its not like “if you spend less than 40 hours a week learning you wont make it”. You could spend 1 hour a week finding a job, get lucky and become a developer via luck alone. Where-as you could spend 80 hours a week grinding away, but never apply to more than 1 job a month and never get hired in any reasonable amount of time.
There are more factors for “breaking into software development” than time spent per week.
As I said earlier, you could learn less spending 40 hours a week than 10 hours. Its all how you manage your time, and on what. It all depends on one’s own goals are, to know what is the most important to learn, and how you actually go about learning.
For example, you could watch 40 hours worth of tutorials and yet learn less than if you spent 10 hours throughout the week trying to build something from scratch. You would end up sitting, staring, maybe copying some code here and there in the tutorial approach. Or you spend a few hours a day struggling against different problems you run into and learning different solutions to different problems, in the “learn by doing way”.
Finally there’s a thing called life that usually takes up your time. You might not be able to devote 40 hours a week to learning, or heck 10 hours a week might be tough. You either make time, or focus the time you have (or both). Just keep things in perspective of your given goals, and make use of what you have to do what you want.
Good luck
Like almost any question in the world, “it depends” is the answer.
It sounds like you like structure and “set numbers” or you’re like me and don’t like them but … they sure do help – I’ve found in busy work times to set a goal for 5 hrs in the work week feels attainable enough that I’ll get started (because 10 minutes is a significant chunk of that, after all!) and … usually do better.
Now I need to do that 15 minutes of clearing up the desktop that I set for today’s goal …