I Want To Help Others On Their Developer Journeys - What Do You Want To Know?

For a while now, I have been getting a lot of gratitude over giving others advice on their journeys to becoming developers. I enjoy helping others, whether it be giving advice on networking, resumes, portfolios or just the learning process in general.

I have decided I want to do something to reach out to people and help them. There are endless amounts of posts on here regarding “Struggling to get an Interview”, and usually people are falling in to the same traps.

As well as this, people are getting lost, or they don’t know how to start getting into the industry. In my mind, it would be great if there was one definitive resource to answer all these questions.



To give you a bit of background on myself, I am a 26 year old freelance web developer and designer. I made a move from a full-time Operations Manager position to start working for myself last year. I also run a business breeding/selling and showing horses which is another story! Since this I have landed myself 4 clients, purely through social networking. Two of them are one off jobs, but the other two are ongoing work.

My role previously was mainly handling client relationships on large construction contracts, employing contractual and full time workers on numerous projects. I have a firm understanding of what it requires to succeed in interviews and what employers want.



Essentially, my idea is to help others help themselves. I want to provide people with schedules, and one on one advice on how to succeed. Advice on what to learn, when to learn it, how to learn it. Code reviews, tutorials, guidance on your resumes/portfolios and a community. As well as a huge resource of tutorials, lessons, interview prep and motivation. I have already enjoyed some success with a Github project doing a similar thing, but I want to grow this outside of a Github repo.

I have the help of a software developer with over 20 years of experience working for large companies (Google/Oracle/EA Games) and also a contract iOS developer who will be helping me depending on what your chosen route is.

The long term goal is to have a community of people who would be willing to take on freelance / contract work.



My question to you is, what would you want to know? Could this be something that you, or anyone you knew could get behind? What sort of things would you want to learn if you were starting out again.

Many thanks in advance to anyone who even takes the time to read through! :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Uhm…the first thing i can think about is the ‘daily routine’ of a developer.

You can find tons of resources to learn every kind of language out there, a lot of sites guiding you through those resources, few sites ( as FCC ) which design a path and enlighten your way , but actually is hard for me to think about some online resource that put you in a ‘real’ team to let you build dummy projects. The closest thing I saw is the “xxx for good” here at FCC, but i think you will not feel free to do something wrong / experiment / … because it’s a real project, something people is working at seriously to reach objectives.

I feel the lack of the ‘last ring of the chain’, when you face other people with different knowledge, different attitude, different roles etc…something like
Project Big Stuff:
5 front end
5 backend

(queue people since the whole team is built, according to different time zones etc…)
The project Big Stuff implies the use of devTools, Mocha, whatnot, ( previously introducted ) obviously managed through github etc…

More than to improve the knowledge in my opinion this experience would improve a lot the new developers self-confidence, giving them the opportunity to face the interviews / freelance work with higher possibility to be successful.

What are the best platforms for jobhunting? Would you recommend using LinkedIn.com and other sites like that and what should your salary expectations be? I think a lot of what I , personally, would like to know is in the entry to the job market and then the expectations that the employer has of you and what you should expect from an employer. I am currently in the process of changing my career with the help of freeCodeCamp and coming from a medical background where you’re hunted as a resource, I’ve never had to worry about the hiring practices, so I’d really like to get an experienced developer’s take on those kinds of topics.

Great work in trying to help others. If you continue doing that kind of thing, you’re going to get so much more in return. :+1:t4:

1 Like

If I understand this correctly…it sounds awesome! Am I right that this is supposed to be part community, part mentorship, and part freelance developer network?

It sounds really promising :sparkles: .

@Layer - I like what you are saying man, and I fully understand what you are getting at. It would be pretty cool to maybe take some of the people who were being mentored, give them a project spec and essentially let them crack on with it. They would need to use methods such as communication, teamwork and they would need to delegate their work between them which is not something you get a practice of.

Possibly it would be interesting to try and incorporate something that they are not necessarily studying, so for instance a back-end feature, which again makes everything more realistic.

@KelthuZayd - An interesting question, and certainly something that I myself have had to figure out the hard way. Coming from a job where I was earning a good salary, it is unrealistic to ever think I would be able to match this salary straight out. Certainly if I was just after money I would stay put and carry on, however to me life is more than just money.

In terms of full-time jobs LinkedIn is certainly one of the best resources. Unfortunately, it can be a bit of a minefield and people need to understand how to set everything up right. One golden rule of thumb for me is not to mention any of these learning resources (Freecodecamp, Udacity etc etc) Potential employers, recruiters don’t actually know what these involve, and putting up a project you created with the tagline “Created as part of Freecodecamp” leaves open the question, “how much of that did they create themselves?”, “were they guided?”.

There was a figure I heard on TV the other day, that 70% of jobs available are never advertised.
I have made relationships with recruiters, through LinkedIn, who have offered me contract work. Just sending people a message every now and again, or a quick phone call opens up opportunities for the future.

I come from the UK, so albeit things might be different elsewhere. A lot of junior developer jobs are offering around £18-20k, which for me was just far too low! Look in the city and start-ups are usually offering up to £30k,
as well as some roles that require other things other than developing… A UX role for instance. A gaming company near me were offering 35k for a junior web designer, so it is definitely realistic to be looking up to around the 30k mark. You need to sell yourself well enough to be considered for these jobs however, and that is completely another topic.

@jeremybbauer - Thanks buddy! That is essentially right! A bit of a mismatch at the minute, I am still doing a lot of flowcharts and spider diagrams and trying to get everything sorted out right! I think I just need to really work out how it will work, for instance, if you go through the program do you automatically get entered into the network? I possibly want to incorporate the Front-End Bible into it as well as I have a lot of comments from people who have read part of it and really like it. Possibly Youtube videos doing walkthrough tutorials on building a website, writing CV’s, talking about networking etc etc.

3 Likes

Ah, okay. Well this sounds pretty cool and helpful! I could definitely get behind this.

First of all congratulations on all your success! :slight_smile: a big question i have and i think about this alot! i too want to become a freelance web developer, i’m learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I do know HTML,CSS, and bootstrap.
But how do i transition from a mere student to a freelance web developer? A tricky question this is! Thank you for your time and advice! Any information even if it’s the smallest is helpful :D!

@jeremybbauer - awesome!

@prime23 - The transition is something which is going to come slowly. Firstly, you need to be networking. Be all over social media (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram etc) and be on the look out for any one that might be after a website or any work done!

Dont be afraid to send a message and ask, the worst you can get is a no. I actually reached out to a company on Instagram (which has been my most successful platform to date). They were using a free Wordpress.com website, and I just asked whether they wanted any work done. I now have designed several publications for them which have been printed in mainstream magazines and have ongoing work.

The good thing about this is people often have a tendency to recommend to others. If you do a good job, they are likely going to say about it to someone else.

I can fully recommend using a shared workspace facility as well. If you haven’t heard of them, you can purchase a desk in an office space full of creatives and developers. Talking to people and building relations is the most important part of freelancing. I met an app developer doing this and now have a handy connection should I ever need app work doing. Definitely worth the fee.

There are several freelance websites that you sign up to and big for jobs, but frankly I have had no success from them. No doubt people are making a lot of money on them, but I have on numerous times tried to be swindled.

1 Like

Hi @JABedford!
Interesting reading what you are doing and that you want to help others. I am pleased to meet you. If you have sometime soon, and see this message, please contact me. I need guidance to speed up my programming skills and how to start a projects (design and others).
Thank you for your kind support.

Hi @JoelBrice.

Sorry for the slow response. The project is still in the very early stages, however at some point I am looking at perhaps doing some collab Udemy courses on the soft skills related to coding in general and trying to “break in” to the market.

I am more than willing to lend advice to you in the meantime however! I will try help best I can!

Hello @JABedford!
Ok that would be great. In the meantime a good practice reading others’ codes would be great. Read with comments and make it a habit.

Hi @JABedford,
This sounds really nice, I’d love to be a part of this community. I’m a former marketer/salesman at a tech company, started learning JS this year on my own, recently finished a coding bootcamp learning Rails, currently working on my own Rails project and getting stuck looking for freelance/full-time work.

Any chance we could schedule a quick chat? I definitely need guidance in overcoming my self-doubt and projecting confidence in interviews. Thanks!

1 Like

Sounds like a cool idea. Are you still developing this platform? @JABedford

Yes it is still under development and has gained momentum from a lot of like minded developers.

The first stage was actually a release of my course designed specifically to help people get a job in web development which was focusing on the soft skills involved that isn’t really taught anywhere else.