How I became a React developer (not what you expect)

man the story of how I became a react developer is honestly so unconventional like I didn't go to school for this I don't have a degree in computer science I didn't take a course I didn't take a boot camp I just became a react developer let me tell you how so the story starts when I was 25 years old and I was still living back in Canada I was so lost with my life and what I wanted to do career-wise I essentially had no idea what I wanted to do and I was also on a deadline the reason why I wasn't on deadline is because my parents specifically my dad has this philosophy that they will provide for the child you know with the greatest joy of their heart pay for housing pay for school pay for food take care of everything until the age of 25. when the child becomes 25 then he no longer considers that child dependent of him and so that child is on his or her own they have to take care of everything pay for everything and even if they want to live in his house in the parents house they have to pay rent just like a normal person so when I turned 25 that was the reality that I was faced with I would have had to pay rent or move out of the house which of course you have to pay rent regardless the problem was I didn't know what I wanted to do I had no idea what I wanted to do career-wise I had to just graduated a couple months before from University from college so I do have a college degree but it's not in computer science it's in economics and the reason why I did economics is because first of all it was kind of easy to do that degree it wasn't that demanding of a degree and I used it as a backup right in case I found nothing else I knew that with a University degree I could at least go and get an office job somewhere in finance in a bank or something and I would be fine I would not starve and be homeless on the street and that degree also allowed me enough time to sort of figure out what I really wanted to do because it was definitely not economics the only problem was that I ran out of time I turned 25 and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life now I have this cousin that lives in Greece in Athens and he's a developer and he knew about what I was going through and he knew me from like a younger age like he was a cousin that I kind of considered as an older brother right so he knew me very well and he knew that I was like scared about you know what to do that I had no idea what to do and so one day we get on a call and He suggests to me to become a soft developer because he knows how I am he knows that I've been kind of always on computers since I was very young I was playing video games at a very young age I learned how to crack games I even built websites not to actually code the website but I used WordPress or some equivalent framework or software to build websites for the various Ventures that I was trying out in my quest to figure out what I wanted to do with my life so he was watching all of these things and he was saying that man like you should become a software developer like I'm pretty sure you would be good at it you know and at the time you know I had never thought of it I never considered becoming a software developer which was a bit unfortunate because I was already 25 years old and I had spent and was still spending all of my time on a computer like software development made sense for my personality but somehow I just completely went over it and not only did he suggest me to become a software developer he also offered me to come to Europe to help me become a softer developer and even if I needed to he would either host me or pay for a room somewhere so that I could have the time to figure this out and then become a soft developer so for me that was like a Lifeline that my cousin was sending me right like I was drowning and he was just throwing something like a life vest overboard so I didn't drown so of course I took it right like this was my only option and I'm like you know what I am going to become a soft developer and I'm going to move to Europe to go and code with my cousin so I decided and from that day on I literally spent 10 to 12 to sometimes 14 15 16 hours a day programming and learning how to code my cousin because he was a developer he knew the market much better than I he told me he's like look you want to become a web developer so you should definitely learn react react is a framework that is highly in demand highly in use and that is a good thing to start with and even build your entire career upon and as we've seen with the market he was definitely right like react is the number one framework still to this day and it's only grown ever since so what I did is I went on Google and I typed how to make an app with react and I followed all of the documentation some tutorials not that many and I started to build applications right away I had a couple of ideas of applications that I wanted to build and I just started to build them now at the same time this is something that I'm really lucky with I had a part-time job at the time right which was the most that I wanted to do at the time and in that job I was in the IT department and I was also working with the web Department helping them out now this wasn't react or wasn't even anything modern for that matter if this was actually a web application that was built and hosted using an ancient framework or hosting solution from Yahoo from like 1995 right so this was ancient this was like a dinosaur but it was a website and I was working on the websites and I was getting familiar with it right so like even before I started to learn react I knew a bit about HTML I knew a bit about CSS I knew a bit about JavaScript but I'd never like fully kind of built an application from scratch so my luck with that job was that they allowed me to use the things that I was learning in react on my own time at work right and get to use them in a real life environment with a real application and real clients so I slowly started to integrate a lot of the things that I was learning on my own at work and that gave me a lot more experience to play with and made me a much more solid developer in a quicker amount of time eventually I even realized that wait a minute like I can build them an application that is better than what they have now that is also custom to their needs because they had some very specific needs and ways of working that they had to keep and I realized that I could build this application and save them a lot of time and actually get paid for it right like that was the whole point of why I was learning react in the first place I wanted to make this my career and get paid for it so I suggested it to them I suggested that I build out their entire application they liked me well enough and they trusted me that they said yes they agreed to me building their application and I did it took me a couple of months I even like went full time for a bit because it was just needed and I actually ended up enjoying it quite a lot and eventually I built the application that to this day they still use many many years later they still use and rely on the application that I built for them in my first few years of being a react developer and honestly with that I am super super proud so after that I then realized that I can do this for clients and that it would make sense to start looking for some other clients to build the apps for them as well so I did I found some other clients either online or they found me or I joined some website that you could find clients and I eventually got another client and then another client where I would build the entire app from them from start to finish so I got these other projects and I eventually moved to Europe I started to get European clients European apps and then after a few years I realized that there's only so much that you can learn if you're doing this all on your own if you're building the entire application on your own from start to finish it's great if you're learning it's great to do at any time but part of what makes a soft developer a great software developer is not just the code that you write it's also how you work within a team how you think about problems how you solve problems right and these are things that I found that I was plateauing in the apps that I was building on my own so I decided that it would be a better idea to move on and to switch towards joining applications that are bigger than one person that I can be part of a team and see what that world is like because I felt that I could get a lot of value from being part of a team and seeing how other developers work because remember up until this point I really had only seen how my cousin develops and myself I didn't really see any other developers so I wasn't even sure if the way that I was building my applications with react if that was even best practices or not you know and it turns out that some of the the things that I was doing were not best practice so I then started to join a couple of different teams a couple of different projects I've worked in startups I've worked in corporate environments and I got to learn a lot about what makes a great soft developer what makes a senior software develop right I learned about how to be agile how to split tickets into separate like sub tickets and iterate quickly how to work within a team how to be part of all of the meetings that you have in agile and scrum how to eventually also lead a team and take on a project and leave a couple of developers right those are things that are beyond the code and that are equally as important to you as you saw the developer to your career as is writing code itself and I'm super super thankful that I got to that point and then I got to that realization that I should move on from just doing the apps by myself and then go into building apps that are bigger with other team members and then that kind of brings us to today where I'm a senior developer almost a team lead and I specialize in front-end development with react which is why I've even made this whole Channel about react is because I realized that I can take all of these lessons that I've learned over the years and make content videos about them and help you achieve the same things that I did right because I spent a lot of years and a lot of hours trying to figure out things that were not so easy to figure out and I think that there's a true benefit in having someone who has gone through these things teaching you and helping you walk along the way so yeah that's my story that's how I became a react developer I told you it was unconventional it's not the path that most people take and that's fine we're all on our own path and we're all working towards the same goal which is to be a great react developer speaking of if you want to become a better react developer outside of these videos because these videos are already a great value in and of themselves I have built a Discord for react developers you're free to join it's completely free and in that Discord you have a bunch of other developers just like you and you also have access to me where I can answer your questions review your code and guide you along the way to becoming a great react developer so if you want to join there's a link in the description it's completely free and yeah my name has been nurse cousin this is causing Solutions thank you so much for watching and I will see you all in the next video ciao

Channel: Cosden Solutions

Views: 4,328

Keywords: react tutorial, react crash course, react developer, learn react, react hook, react hooks, react hooks tutorial, useeffect hook, useeffect tutorial, programming tutorial, react hooks explained, computer science, tutorial for beginners, react component, learn programming, web development, frontend development, coding for beginners, simple code, easy programming

Id: vjqFZJHuo1Q

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2023