I’m haven’t posted much here on the forum yet, but I wanted to share my story.
I joined freeCodeCamp around June last year after learning about it through a Medium article I think. Although I already had some programming and frontend development knowledge at the moment, I saw it as a good alternative to the tutorials and other courses out there. I really enjoyed the community environment and the opportunity to learn from others.
Doing the frontend projects really gave me the push I needed to always keep learning and practising to get to my goal of getting a job as a developer.
I applied to many many jobs, mostly through linkedin and even got to some phone interviews. My main criteria for selecting the company was to look it up to see what they did and if I was at least a bit interested I would apply (I wasn’t being picky because I wanted to see if I just got a response).
In January I posted something on codepen (link here)(it no longer works because the images are externally sourced and now you need a pro account) and it appeared in reddit. Then an agency from Canada contacted me and offered me a small remote freelancing gig doing development using the Shopify platform. (I liked it a lot because I was able to work part time during the evenings and keep my current job at the time.)
Fast forward to March this year, when I got my first full-time offer to be a frontend developer.
For the interview for the job I have now they didn’t ask me any computer science-y stuff, I think because the role is very front-end and design oriented. They asked me about the technologies I knew and they did assign me a small real-life coding exercise (designing and coding something similar to a product card).
My overall viewpoint is that working on your own projects is very helpful, I think because you have to learn to solve your own problems. Even though it’s very likely you find a solution to a similar problem, the process of adapting it to your own code will help cement all of that knowledge. And obviously it also helps to have projects of your own when you’re looking for a job.
To finish things up, I wanted to say to everyone out there having doubts that it’s truly possible to become a developer if you want to, with hard work and dedication. And I wanted to thank this awesome community that keeps me motivated every day.
I see that you did a majority of your freeCodeCamp work back in 2016…
What happened from then till now?
How did you get the freelancing gig for a company in Canada while you’re not in Canada?
No seriously, there’s a huge gap between Oct 23, 2016 to now… What were you doing to better yourself for a career opportunity?
What sites did you use to learn?
What do you think you did well during your learning process?
Where do you feel that you could / should have improved or done better?
How do you feel that your learning process helped you to get the role that you’ve achieved?
How do you feel learning was lacking after you’ve gone through the process of getting the role? (Clearly, it wasn’t lacking because they hired you but, I hope you can see what I’m trying to ask.)
How many roles did you apply for before landing this one?
How did you apply to the roles that you were attracted to?
Did you keep track of the companies and roles that you applied to?
Did they ask you any questions about Computer Science-y stuff: Big O Notation, Stacks, Binary Trees, Link Lists, Queues, Optimizing Sorting Algorithms, Red Black Trees, Bit manipulation, Hash Tables… Just to name a few.
Did you have to Whiteboard during any of the interviews? What was it like?
What is your overall viewpoint about the learning process and actually obtaining employment?
And ummm… still… Oct 2016 to Jun 2017, that’s like what 8 months?
Hey @revisualize, I’m curious as well, however asking maybe just one or two questions will help @kkhenriquez help you.
It seems like our question is mostly on how did @kkhenriquez keep his knowledge fresh over the period of 8 months? And what was the most significant impact for @kkhenriquez during this 8 month period.
Hi @revisualize, @aoot during those months I tried to stay active on codepen and reading on Medium (the FCC channel is a great source) to learn new topics in small bits.
I applied to many many jobs, mostly through linkedin and even got to some phone interviews, my main criteria for selecting the company was to look it up to see what they did and if I was at least a bit interested I would apply (I wasn’t being picky because I wanted to see if I just got a response).
In January I posted something on codepen (link here)(it no longer works because the images are externally sourced and now you need a pro account) and it appeared in reddit. The agency from Canada contacted me and offered me a small gig (I liked it a lot because I was able to work part time during the evenings and keep my current job at the time).
For the interview for the job I have now they didn’t ask me any computer science-y stuff, I think because the role is very front-end and design oriented. They asked me about the technologies I knew and they did assign me a small real-life coding exercise (designing and coding something similar to a product card).
My overall viewpoint is that working on your own projects is very helpful, I think because you have to learn to solve your own problems. Even though it’s very likely you find a solution to a similar problem, the process of adapting it to your own code will help cement all of that knowledge. And obviously it also helps to have projects of your own when you’re looking for a job.
Great questions @aoot and @revisualize. I’ve spliced @kkhenriquez’s answer to these questions into his original post up top for the benefit of future readers.
@kkhenriquez congratulations on getting your first developer job! Thanks for sharing your story of how building projects helped you get discovered on Reddit by an employer. This is inspiring and helpful!
Dude clip-paths drove me crazy I was looking for a custom solution/animation for a long time to get a sticker peel effect to work for my old codepen project
but i ended up removing the animation for the github repo
