I am a graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from India. I was in my second-to-last semester of college and up until then I had always thought that I wasn’t cut out to be coder. I thought coding was a skill that people had naturally or they can’t do it all. The present me would scoff at the idea that the younger me had.
I had some acquaintance with computer languages like C and C++ before and took up course on it. But they were too textbook based and had an end goal that I had to pass this exam. The courses never aimed to create a spark of creativity, it was just a course. They fed into my assumption that coding was a chore or a task.
I started #100DaysOfCode and the FreeCodeCamp curriculum hoping I would have something to do while my college finished and I was looking for a job.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. I started from the beginning at FreeCodeCamp, spending 2 hours each day on it in the beginning. Focusing on the smaller aspects of HTML and CSS and then moving up to other aspects made me excited. I had never thought of finding that this could be fun! After finishing my first Responsive Web Design Project - Tribute Page, I was convinced that I liked coding and had the sudden enthusiasm to learn and make it into a career.
The supportive community on Twitter as I updated my progress each day there also helped to uplift me. It made me realise that I wasn’t alone and there were other people learning there with me.
I did a few other things along with FreeCodeCamp curriculum. I would usually have a strict 10-5 period, 7 hours everyday where I would learn. I stopped occasionally when I had my end semester exams and college classes.
Some of the few things I did in the span of 6 months:
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Completed the Responsive Web Design Curriculum (except 2 projects which I completed a few days back)
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Almost completed the Javascript Algorithms And Data Structures Curriculum (except half of the Intermediate Algorithms and the projects)
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These two made me learn the Front End basics and did not allow me to skip forth and just tackle big problems. I had to learn how to tackle the smaller problems first.
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Completed the ‘MongoDB for Developers’ course from MongoDB University. It was a 4 weeks course which made me familiarize myself with NOSQL Databases and how to implement database in an application.
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Created an IoT project from scratch for the final year college project along with two other team members. We just had the concept of it and didn’t know how to actually implement it. We would spend days thinking about how to connect Raspberry PI with a Javascript Application that we were creating and how to perform the tasks we wanted. We achieved the objective eventually, and we learned a lot on how to apply the knowledge that we had to create something.
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Every project I created, I made a repository of it in Github. It helps a lot. The internship I got saw my projects on Github and shortlisted me on the basis of that.
I had come far than before but not quite. I was still looking for a developer job. I got rejected a few times. I also used to freeze up during solving real time whiteboard coding challenges especially when someone was watching me. I was getting better at it though as I no longer looked at the problem on the surface level only, but I actually knew how to begin to solve it. Some of the jobs I rejected, because they didn’t have a position for a developer, only analyst positions etc.
Then finally I got accepted for an internship as a ‘Front End Developer’ for 2 months. My goals were being achieved!
All through my internship, I never stopped learning or stopped asking questions wherever I got stuck. Everything wasn’t easy, some of the simplest tasks I had to do, I got stuck and looked to Stack Overflow for help. But after I got through it, it felt amazing.
After 2 months, they reviewed my performance and promoted me as a full time employee! I have just started learning the backend and to manage it. So far, I’m doing great!
Earlier when I was given a task to do it and see if it possible to implement or not. I would say ‘I am not sure. Let me research it.’ Now I say, ‘I’m sure it would be possible. Let me research about it!’
We usually think that we aren’t good enough for something or we don’t know enough to apply for a job or an internship. But that’s not true. Everything is achievable and if we don’t try, we won’t learn. Learning is a continuous process which does not stop. We just get better!