In the following posts I will document my journey towards becoming a developer. The main objective is to be able to reference my learning trajectory and get an overview of where I am and how I got there.
So let me start at the beginning.
When did I get the idea to become a developer?
Although I am working as a support agent for a software company, I did not aspire to become a developer. I enjoyed technology, but always fancied myself more of a consumer than a creator. Developers were like these mythical creatures, able to solve impossibly abstract problems. Joining their ranks did not seem like a real option to me.
This changed when I read an article by Derek Sivers. In a world ruled by technology, he said, you should at least know the basics of how that technology works. TL;DR everyone should learn programming!
These are the main sites that I have used so far to learn how to code:
- FreeCodeCamp: very easy to get started and I liked that from the beginning you learn by solving little code challenges. The difficulty level does ramp up significantly though. In particular the projects you have to do by yourself can be hard, because you go from a guided learning process to suddenly having to build something on your own from scratch.
- Codecademy: best online courses I found so far. Really nice layout and well thought out learning process. I did buy the Pro version to get access to the quizzes and projects. They are currently updating the courses, so some older courses are a bit outdated. This is where I first learned Ruby.
- Udacity: not quite as good as Codecademy, but good to reference for specific doubts I had about HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
- The Odin Project: currently I am going through this open source curriculum. Nice thing about this course is that you’re not coding in a closed environment and are forced to learn development tools from the beginning, like the command line and Git. They also reference a lot of great online resources on each subject that I’m bookmarking for later use.
What’s next?
The online courses really helped me make up my mind that this the path I want to pursue and gave me basic knowledge of the full development stack. Still I wanted something that would help accelerate my learning. So after doing some research I decided…
…to join the Le Wagon developer bootcamp!
I will be starting at the end of September in the Lisbon batch. Really excited :)
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