anyone else want to learn?
I am a 23-year-old male looking to enter the tech industry. Currently, I work in a factory sanding steel doors all day. Where I work right now is more of a job than a career. I’m looking at getting into the tech industry. Ideally, I would find a group of individuals who would like to learn about tech as well. Starting from zero is going to be a challenge, but I am ambitious enough to make it happen. If anyone would like to join me on my journey, feel free. For those who already have careers in this field, where would you start? What resources would you read? What online training would you do? What industry is going to “boom”?
4 Replies
First of all, I respect the hustle man!! I personally basically learned all fundamentals from this course
https://www.udemy.com/course/the-web-developer-bootcamp
It coveres a lot of the essentials if you want to get into web dev. HTML, CSS, JS, Node, Express, Mongo, ... . It's been updated since I took it and looks like it now also includes a React section.
Obviously there's a loooot of great and free stuff on Youtube out there too, but IMHO if you get this on sale at like $10 (which you always should, sales happen frequently. I don't think anyone every really buys a udemy course at full price lol) I think it's more than worth it. All course material is centralised, with a lot of reference material available + a whole community of people taking the same cousre
obv this is mainly relevant if web dev is the path you wanna take but yeah I personally owe a lot to this course
I started with making a hoppy project, it was a blog with comments.
Best way to learn something - build something. Most of courses are just squeezing money out of you. You can learn everything you need from documentations and various articles.
You need skill to search for a information online and skill to read documentation.
IT is about solving challenges.
But now there is not so many jobs and way too many people, hiring is crazy, you will be lucky to find some internship, even unpaid one.
i did this a few years ago (i was a teacher, but same thing in terms of working full time and grinding nights and weekends to break into tech with a budget of $0)
if you want to do web (imo the easiest area to break into self taught and without a background in cs/math), the goal to being even remotely hireable is to get to the point where you can build a project with
- a frontend (react or some other framework)
- a backend (doesn't matter which language/framework, node makes sense because it's the same language as the frontend, but you can also check local job listings and see what's most in demand)
- a database (sql, don't worry too much about picking a specific one, they're more similar than different)
once you know enough about these to build stuff, pick one of them and get very good at it. the best place to be is a specialist who also has enough generalist knowledge to get other stuff done.
getting to this point also requires learning some other stuff like html/css, how http requests work, auth, how to get an app from your computer onto the internet, git, etc.
my biggest advice would be
- expect this to take 2 years IF you put in a lot of work, longer if you put in less. i got hired after 18 months, but it was in a better market and i was very lucky.
- dont get stuck on just doing courses. always build a project after you learn something. the best type of project is one with users. the easiest user to find is yourself, but other people are even better.
- i don't think which courses you do matters too much. i mostly did CS50, FreeCodeCamp, Jack Herrington's YouTube videos on TypeScript and React, and Tom Does Tech's videos for backend stuff. but no matter what you pick, most of your time should be spent building your own things, because the most important skill is getting to a point where you can solve any problem you come across.
- dont get too caught up in the webdev hype cycle. most companies are still using stuff from 5 years ago.
- i never found learning together with others to be very useful. everyone has their own pace. instead find discord servers for whatever you're learning/using and ask questions that you can't solve by searching the internet.
- one of the most important skills is learning how to read (bad) documentation. it's very daunting at first but super important. most of your answers are found there.
great advice, thanks! :)