Courses to get a career in programming?

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Viktor K
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Joined: Sat Jul 30, 2016 9:45 pm

Re: Courses to get a career in programming?

Post by Viktor K »

Salathor wrote:
Thu Jul 29, 2021 10:28 am
Thanks for the tips on FreeCodeCamp. I've worked my way through much of the javascript algos and datastructures section and learned a lot that I didn't know about (and learned even more about what I'm going to need to practice--regexes and recursion (which I still don't understand the point of, even if I understand how to do it just well enough to pass the test)).
I would resist the urge to deep dive or hyper focus on some more technical things. These take time away from working on projects or learning enough to build a project. They could be useful if it comes up in an interview, but that’s not guaranteed. You can spend extra time hyper focusing on these things and then never apply them. Also, there are many, many, many technical parts more than recursion and regex, eg linked lists, trees, maps, etc. What that means is that the list of technical things to learn more about is endless. You will always have something to learn. So if you focus on really learning these technical pieces, you could forever not build a project.

When you build a project, you will find things you don’t know how to do, naturally. I built a project that returned an array of data, and needed to display it in the webpage. I didn’t know how to do that, and it wasn’t in the curriculum. Now it’s something I do everyday quite naturally. So I both learned how to do something applicable, and I made something to show future prospective employers.

Every interview I had, the team had looked at my portfolio page. The sooner you can get that up, the better. Without it, you might not even get interviews. My resume didn’t even have developer jobs on it, it just had my projects and the techs I used.

Once you start getting interviews, then you can sacrifice some time to deepdive on the beginner CS topics like linked lists, binary trees, recursion, etc. Not every position cares about these. I’m only just now studying and learning them at 2 years experience of not using anything more than loops and array methods. And that’s for upcoming interviews, not my current job.

Salathor
Posts: 394
Joined: Fri Dec 18, 2015 11:49 am
Location: California, USA

Re: Courses to get a career in programming?

Post by Salathor »

Viktor K wrote:
Fri Jul 30, 2021 9:33 am
Thanks for the insight!

Asush
Posts: 7
Joined: Tue Aug 03, 2021 2:21 pm

Re: Courses to get a career in programming?

Post by Asush »

I self taught and got a job a few years ago. I agree having a few projects is the most important thing. Mine were not super polished and I didn't have that many - don't feel like it has to be perfect before you start applying.

I think it's enough to have a few things that are finished (even if it's finished with limited features and not polished), online somewhere, and the code on github or similar. Noone is going to read the code but they might look at the readme (and it shows that you can use version control).

Also agree with what Viktor said about not deep diving on all the technical topics, and focussing on portfolio until close to the time you will be doing interviews. Spending the time building something is probably going to have greater returns. You don't need to know everything to get a job. You do need to demonstrate the skills you will demonstrate with your projects, and the abilities you gain from doing them. (caveat: if you are particularly interested in regex or something and enjoying learning about it - then go for it)

I also had a blog with a handful of short quite straightforward posts about things I had found interesting in my learning, and a very basic design. I think it might have helped to show that I was enthusiastic and could communicate, I remember one interviewer commented on it. But it's definitely not required so I would only try and do this if you think you will enjoy it and it won't be too stressful deciding to publish (I struggled with that).

Also agree that it's easier to get the second job.

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