No. Zero. Days. My Roadmap from Javascript noob to Full Stack Developer in 12 Months

Would you have any recommendation for someone who simply CANNOT afford a bootcamp? What would you have done? I’m in a very rural area also.

I read your post and I have been doing something similar the past year, but the order of events is all different. Like I’m pretty comfortable with Redux for example, but I’ve yet to completely finish the Front End Cert.

Anyway. Good post, thanks for sharing.

can’t afford a bootcamp? do the P1xt guide. pay for frontendmasters (30?/month), or get the free pluralsight trial ($0), pay for egghead.io ($199/yr). blast through all those courses. then freelance. that’s what i would do.

well, cover your bases in the frontend. its the least you can do. :slight_smile:

sorry my site went down - i will have to fix this tomorrow

I can’t afford any extra purchases, unfortunately, although I have already purchased several Udemy courses and go through them. I was looking at PXguide. I find it interesting that you recommend Freelancing and the PX guide when in your blog you pretty much dissed them both. And in this thread you mentioned you don’t recommend CS50, but it’s obviously in the PXGuide. Not to nitpick, I’m just genuinley curious about your thought process on this. A year in, I’m starting to feel the time crunch of not having a job, except I don’t have any old career back to fall on, yeah?

Additionally, it’s nice to see you have similar funky periods, those are the worst. I try to do a bit of coding every day regardless. Even 15-20 minutes if it’s bad. I think that is the key to getting the patterns engrained.

yeah as far as i’m concerned they are second choice after the path I pursued. you asked for alternatives to the path I pursued sooo there you go. i only dissed them in terms of listing what i didnt like about them. but that doesnt mean that they dont have merits in their own right. i just dont have the space to do a whole balanced pros vs cons analysis.

Awesome read, congratulations on the job - sounds like you’ve earned it. I have a couple of questions:

  • Knowing what you know now, if you were currently back at the start of your journey (the FCC front-end cert) what would you focus your learning on?

  • How much of an advantage did you feel that the FCC certs gave you compared to other bootcampers that hadn’t coded before?

I’m pretty near the start of my coding journey (just finishing up CS50, and halfway through the front-end cert currently) so I’m no expert. But FWIW I do think Harvard CS50 is an extremely valuable place to start for a beginner. In terms of the sheer quality of learning resources it blows every other free coding course away - it felt to me that whereas FCC just teaches you to program, CS50 goes deeper into the fundamentals and really forces you to think about what you’re doing & program well. My 2c.

I’m in agreement with @sw-yx

I’ve taken a similar path he has through FCC and doing a bootcamp. As useful and valuable the CS50 course is and the guides @p1xt put together, it can be more of a distraction considering you’ve already have base applied knowledge.

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raw javascript. playing fast-and-loose with es5 vs es6 concepts really hurt me in the middle few months and if i just calmed down and read a few basic tutorials i think i would have saved myself a lot of time.

one thing i definitely skimmed on is css knowledge. i just learned the bare minimum and moved on. i think that was fine but ultimately it will bite me in the ass when i have to produce something that looks acceptable on a tight deadline and can’t use bootstrap.

a metric shit ton. i was looking at everything for the second time while they were looking at things for the first time. i had people repeatedly come up to me and tell me they wish they had done what I did. so i guess thats a big part of why i am writing this thing now.

sure, i’m the kind of guy that thinks there are multiple ways to success. my way may not be yours and thats fine. debating which is better is kinda stupid. all i did was say why i preferred a different path over that. ymmv.

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Thank you for sharing this! It’s inspirational and also nice to know you struggled but persisted!

Yesterday was my first day writing my no zero days log. I’ve decided I’m going to do it for all the 3 things I’m passionate about and would like to continue improving: guitar, Calligraphy and code.

I’ll be referring back to this as I continue to advance in the curriculum because I’m sure there is much that went straight over my head

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understood, thanks buddy.

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Simply, thank you. Very inspirational.

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Good read, but I missed the part where you interviewed at Google…

ha. left it out on purpose. i had 9 interviews total. thats for another story.

This line speaks alot to me as I have spent about 10 years total(5 years school, 5 years career) in my previous career(Industrial Engineering). Similarly, I am 32 years old and looking to transition into the Web Development world.

That said, how many hours daily were you spending on learning and practicing coding before bootcamp? I feel that due to current circumstances(full-time job), I can only dedicate 2-3 hours daily. Now if someone is willing to pay my rent, than I can commit to a fulltime boot camp. :wink:

Thanks again Shawn!

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I have a non-coding related full-time job and I’d like to get into web development professionally too.

I usually can get at least 20 hours in a week, but if I try really hard I can do 30. It’s doable, you just have to really manage your time well.

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I apologize for the slow reply!
There are lots of times at work that I don’t understand things that I feel should be simple. And the fact that I don’t do many personal projects or anything because I am always busy with work. No real specific examples, but just feel that I should know how to do a lot more for how long I have been working on things and trying to motivate myself and not get burnt out.

hello!
i admit i was spending a lot more than 2-3 hours a day back then. probably closer to 4-5hours. i didn’t have family distractions and i did pretty much the bare minimum for my job. i also used past savings to pay for bootcamp.

good luck. your path wont be similar to mine but i hope it might help in some small way.

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i think this is realistic. honestly for me its not so much managing my time well as just dropping basically everything else.

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That was impressive. No. Zero. Days. Just shows you what is possible with some dedication. Thank you for posting.

I am still reading through the post, but I think all of the instances of “FreeCodeCamp” should be changed to “freeCodeCamp”. Long live camelCase!

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