Many newcomers do not know where to start their journey in IT. We collected useful resources and tips on coding, and also we will tell you how to study the market. If you want to succeed in coding, the following information will help you.
- Learn fundamental things right away. Don’t waste your time on technology – you can work with this later! Algorithms, data structures, and the practice of solving standard problems are the main things here. By stepping over these topics now, you will either ruin your career in the future, or you will have to return to this topic and find time to study with difficulty.
It will be useful to refer to courses and videos, for example, on the coding platforms or simply on YouTube. Be sure to practice solving real problems. There are many platforms for this. All this knowledge will allow you to easily and quickly prepare for an interview in any large company. At the same time, do not rush. It is better to understand in more detail and solve more problems for a better understanding of the topic.
If you’ve started learning to code and run into some problems, you can ask for help on mycodinghomework.com. An expert in coding will help you with tasks of varying complexity. Moreover, you will get a better understanding of how to code in your language properly.
- Try to find a few problems that interest you and write more or less real applications that:
- Solve a clear problem.
- Have a well-designed open-source code on GitHub.
- Can be described in an article with diagrams, graphs, and pictures.
If you’re having a hard time deciding on a topic like this, here are some resources to get ideas:
- Try participating in a coding competition (both online and offline) and get the idea from there. You can even continue the project started during the event.
- Read the mega-list of projects here.
- See the list of projects here.
Briefly describe your projects in a resume. Even simple things will show your activity and interest. A hiring manager would rather hire an inexperienced but active developer than a passive freeloader.
- Start interviewing at the company. Choose a job in a company where:
- The interviews were more difficult and interesting.
- There is a practice of training young specialists.
Choose a company not by the level of salary but by how much you can learn in the first two to three years of your career. There are companies that pay a lot, even for beginners, but no one will train you or take care of your growth; no one will review your code and give advice on improvements. It is quite possible that you will be loaded with a completely different job in which you will not code much. Don’t think that your first job will be your last.
In addition, a high level of salary, while you are a novice specialist relaxes. Go where you will be given knowledge and experience. Do not worry; you will soon come to good money, but it takes a lot of time to become a real professional, and you should not waste it for the sake of quick profit.
As a rule, the more complex and interesting the interview, the more promising the work in the company. Even if after the interview you feel like a “loser,” but the company is ready to take you “as an apprentice” – this is a great chance!
All further steps will be determined by you personally or with the help of your colleagues, friends, and leaders. Having gained fundamental knowledge and first experience, you can easily begin to master technologies, move between programming stacks and companies, and in general, “find yourself.”
How to master the profession of a coder for a specialist from another field
Things are somewhat different with experienced professionals from other fields who want to change their profession. And the point is not the lack of potential, just the opposite, but the fact that you can potentially combine your accumulated experience with the profession of a coder, and this will open up huge opportunities for you.
The importance of the combination of two professions has already been talked about a lot, and such specialists are very valuable. But it’s important to do it right.
The first step is to decide what exactly attracts you to the field of programming and in which “stack” of technologies, you could realize yourself most effectively. At the very beginning of the journey, you may not yet know what will be your real “passion,” so it’s worth answering these simple questions:
- Do I want to create mobile applications?
- Do I want to create cool beautiful websites?
- Do I want to create business applications (banking, calculation, statistics tools, etc.)?
- Do I want to program robots, games, databases, compilers, complex applications, or artificial intelligence?
The second step is to study the existing companies on the market and the technologies they use:
- Make a list of companies that deal with a field or subject that interests you.
- Look at job descriptions for the technology they require from candidates. Usually, this is a language, a framework, and a set of related tools.
For example:
- C#, Git, .NET, SQL
- Java, Git, Spring, SQL
- JavaScript, ReactJS, etc.
- Android, Kotlin, etc.
- ObjC, iOS, Swift, etc.
- Pick out the most overlapping list of all jobs and companies, and narrow down the list to a state where there is exactly one programming language and one core framework.
As an inexperienced specialist in a reasonable time, you can not learn so much and not so deep, but this may already be enough to get a job.
Step three is to select one or more immediate targets for creating a more or less real application in the learning process. The goal can be big (creating a game), small (creating a simple website), useful (automating the process), or not very useful (AI recommending the color of ice cream).
It is important that you complete one or more of these projects, learning the programming language and framework along the way. It is also essential that the goal motivates you to move and not quit.