Another year and another article giving a guide on how to become a web devloper.
The only difference being now, I’m actually trying to take it seriously unlike the last 4 years. I’ll most likely be using this article as a guideline for my own learning. As the title suggests, I finished a Web Development Bootcamp as of March 18th 2019. This is the first step on my journey, which I wrote about here. Total time was 5 months from the inital purchase back in Novemeber of 2018. It was a difficult journey, there were many times I wanted to give up but I was determined to finish this course and move onto something better. This post is a quick summary of what of I’ve learned and what I will do next.
1) The Front End
The course started with the languages HTML5, CSS3, Javascript and Boostrap framework. These technologies are used in almost every browser page. HTML uses tags to structure the skeleton of the browser page. CSS provides styling such as colours and width for a elements on the page itself. Javascript provided interactive functionality.
Bootstrap is a css library that makes styling of webpages much faster. When I started the course it was using bootstrap 3 but has since added the bootstrap4 and flexbox modules. I will return and complete these at a later date. The projects made in this section were single page applications with limited interactivity.
2) The backend
This was the part that made me feel like an actual developer. We setup our cloudbased ides and started using node, express and mongo database, thus the name “MEN” stack. Here not only would we be building apps, we’d have to maintain whatever data was used to test functionality. With each refactor we added more fucntionality from initial routes all the way up to user authentication and permissions. This app is still be worked of as of typing and I will be pushing updates.
We also learned git as our version control and heorku as a cloud hosting service. Mongo Atlas was our cloud hosting service that offers a free initial cluster to store the data from our app. We also used Heroku to deploy our app on the cloud. Since I’ve only done the one test and full app, this still remains free. Finally to close, I learned some intermediate javascript focusing on object oriented programming.
3) Overall Takeaways
I’m glad that this course will constantly update with new technolgies. Especially since development is moving towards cloud services I’m glad I have some familiarity with some of the technology that I’ll have to use in futue jobs. I’m glad that the linux tricks I’ve been teaching myself over the last couple of years have paid off. I seem to learn faster with project based approaches and should seek them out to keep myskills up to date. The scattergun approach in the past hasn’t really worked all that well, but putting in deliberate practice has.
4) So what is next?
Well I have a basic foundation, but I’m far from ready to apply to jobs yet. While I do have the fundamentals of buinding a project down, I know I’m going to need to learn a lot more. I’m going to need a much broader understanding computer science concepts. To prepare I’m reading cracking the coding interview 6th edition and looking at coding interview questions on websites. While this can be done independently, I realize that I’m going to need mentorship from people who are self taught and have gone through this process before.
There’s so much to learn, but if I keep this up I should reach my goal of getting an entry level software engineer job by August 1, 2019. But if not I’m better than I was four years ago when I started. Thanks for reading.