Web developing changed my life, keep on going!

Seriously, 3 years ago I had 0 direction in life and struggled with depression. I was 28 years old and working as a janitor…I hated my everyday life as I knew I had potential but I didn’t know what I should do at all in life and felt like I wasted my learning years for not finding what I liked and being all over the place…

I somehow found freecodecamp and something that I always thought was for people with high degrees and whatnot started to seem attainable. While I was trying to get some IT degree (regular education that was terrible) I dropped everything to focus on learning web development.

Fast forward one year, I got a Junior web dev job in Spain during the recession when it was pretty hard to work. Fast forward two more years, the company where I was a Junior at, agreed to make my contract flexible, to just go to the office twice a week and I have found a job at another company that allows me to work from home and make my work at my own pace from home dream come true, so not only did I find one web dev job, but two. I went from feeling lost to feel very proud about myself and my job. Went from thinking that studying wasn’t for me to loving the privilege that it is to be able to sit infront of my computer and have access to so many content that our industry offers for people wanting to learn.

This is not meant to boast really but to say, if I can do it, you can too, invest in this, I had to ignore some people in my past that were telling me that it was a stupid idea to follow a career that was not regulated or ordinary. Block that noise and believe in it, it will simply happen if you are serious about it and you put in the time.

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Awesome man! I can relate a lot to your first paragraph!

I was 27 at the time, but otherwise same thing… I just didn’t know where I was going, felt like my potential was squandered, and like somewhere along the way I had just made one too many wrong turns and ended up somewhere I didn’t want to be. Now, I feel energized every day!

I just completed a coding boot camp and I feel like I don’t know that much more than I did when I started the program. I’m going to keep trying to learn as much as I can, but finding a job doing something I barely know how to do when there are so many other people who can do it better seems really daunting.

I was hopeful and excited when I started, but now I’m starting to sink into depression. I guess I have to just keep learning.

Feel like a coding boot camp should leave you a lot better off than that. Have you been making personal projects, pushing code to GitHub, deploying websites? Pair programming? These are the things I’ve done and I feel ready. Not like I’m the best developer in the world, obviously, but that I’m ready to join the right team to accelerate my learning and hopefully within some reasonable amount of time start contributing.

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How long was the bootcamp?

Reading your post made me wish there was an option to give more :heart: to a post, similar to how you can add multiple claps on the ‘medium’ website.

Well done to you for sticking to your guns, proving people wrong and turning your life around!

For anyone else reading this thread that has doubters, let me say this…the only person who needs to believe in you, is YOU! When you have doubters, use that energy, flip it upside down and turn it into drive…drive to prove them wrong! As @Sergi-O mentioned, we are blessed to live in a time where we have easy access to such valuable information, information that allows anyone with an internet connection, some time, and some drive to change their situation, to do just that…and lets not forget, sites like freeCodeCamp, the founder(s), devs and the community which are essentially the enablers to such change.

I wholeheartedly approve of this post +197!

Well done to you @Sergi-O, very well done, indeed! :blush: :heart:

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I’m 30 y.o. and I also feel like I’ve wasted the time I could have spent on learning and getting a dream job, doubting if it’s even worth trying after all this time. My only skill is decent English (for a non English-speaking country anyway), thanks to which I have a job but not many opportunities overall. And I just found freeCodeCamp and it looks awesome for learning. Your post has given me a reassuring inspirational boost. Thank you for sharing your story and best of luck in your future projects and goals!

If you like it you can do it, by the time you are 31 or 32 you can have a solid skillset. English is a big plus, it was for me as well as I’m in Spain and the second job I got was in an only English speaking company, that will open some doors as well.

If you are serious about it, use FreecodeCamp with other resources like some Udemy bootcamp courses (look for the most selled courses and wait for them to cost 10 bucks which they do from time to time) for example which will give you a structured learning path and a different way of learning (by watching videos and doing projects).

Feel free to pm if you have any doubts along the way.

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It was part time for 6 months. 3 days a week.

Hey man, my question is why learn HTML and CSS when there are website like wix, WordPress, and others available to create a website with pretty much no skills? Only this thing worrying me :roll_eyes:

Cheers.

Basically, the websites you refer to are of the most basic kind, limited look and limited functionality.

Many clients are looking for a much more custom look and feel, and these “build yourself” websites just are not up to the task of fulfilling these client’s expectations.

Don’t worry @thepannu786 there is lots of work to go around! Learn your html, your css, and your javascript…

I understand your concern but believe me, Wix and pre-made Wordpress themes have a market share that should not really concern you…Let me elaborate. I work in a company where first, the clients have a set of requirements, then the design department creates a design that meets those requirements, brand identity, etc. At this point already, no Wix or Wordpress pre-made theme can do that so only if you know how to develop a website you can do that. Then we do use Wordpress so the clients can populate and have certain freedom with their website but only where we decide or where they need, so think of Wordpress only as a data entry layer and with Advanced Custom Fields and custom posts and categories? A very powerful one. So you can still use Wordpress and have a 100% custom website. Then we offer a certain functionality that is built with Vue.js, which we incorporate with Wordpress and with the client data with an API, so as you see things can get complex very quickly.

I honestly think that Wordpress themes or Wix should never stop you from learning…You still need HTML and CSS for any custom thing you may want to do within Wordpress and Wix or React or Vue or Gatsby, etc. Client requests can be wild and the more “open” your website is the easier will be to do that…It’s pretty terrible to add functionalities to a page built with a builder but for a website you coded entirely yourself, not so much.

So yes in a real world scenario a big company won’t build their website using a Wordpress theme, they will pay an agency and have certain requirements and as a developer you may choose to use Wordpress to offer those clients a lot of flexibility to customize their website but you want to build the whole thing yourself.

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I gotta correct you on this last bit. There are in fact lots of big companies using WordPress.

Here is a list created in June 2020.

Who Uses WordPress? How About These 100+ Famous Brands

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Thank you for your encouragement!!!

I think I may have not explained myself well. We create websites for big companies using Wordpress, what I meant is that they will still hire an agency to create a custom Wordpress website that meets their requirements, that the CEO won’t just pick a WP theme and create the website himself.

Congratulations, this is great. Best of luck on your journey

Hey thanks to all for your replies. It did really helped me to keep going and motivated me. Be safe.

Cheers again.

thanks man, i feel like u in your past three years ago now
im so lost, but i working hard on this. maybe i back here three years later to share to u my history. i hope it’s like yours.