How I became a web developer after 6 months. (UK)

hello there my name is Tom and today I'm going to tell you how I became a web developer in six months and hopefully I'm gonna be able to give you guys some pointers on how you can do it as well so I'm kind of going to split this video into two parts first off I'm gonna talk about my story and how I got my first web 2000 position in six months and then secondly I'm gonna talk about some cool texts that I really think can be a bit of a shortcut for you guys into getting hopefully your first opportunity and I know that's really cliche but I actually think there's some really cool text out there like materialize and bootstrap and sass which really gonna help you get job interviews and really gonna help you get opportunities that you need to start letting to go full-time because learning to code part-time it's hard and ladies go full-time with support there is easy and your growth is going to go from here to here if you get that job opportunity so anyway on to my story six months ago I was a guitar teacher and I challenge you to find someone who is less qualified to do my current position than I was I didn't have a technical degree at all I didn't have math or physics or any of that stuff and I was in a job that most people don't think is a job and it was a job but it was kind of a hard sell yeah so anyway I started learning how to code and the first thing I did and something that I think you guys can do to stray off the bat is start talking to people who you know who know how to code because software development web development wherever you want to call there is such a massive massive field and that's why it's awesome and that's why I want to be in that space because it gives you opportunities to learn and grow and develop yourself which is excellent and I'm sure that's why you guys want to be in that space as well but also as someone who's trying to self teach is perhaps its huge disadvantage because you don't really know what you want to zero in on to get opportunities so the first thing I did was I went and talked to my buddy Sam I had a great resource in him he was a I worked in security at a local company and he had about five maybe six years experience not sure how old-timers now for anyway I want to talk to my buddy and he says look I know some web dev stuff I could teach you some web dev stuff and we mostly just like mucked around with JavaScript but what he gave me was invaluable context and that is something you just cannot buy on a udemy course so that is my first tip just go out there and talk to people but anyway that's my story I started about March and you know by kind of like April time I produced this website with sounds helped and I asked him am I am I ready to start going for job interviews now because I was really hating my current job I wanted to get out so I was like you know am I kind of ready and he basically just said no but he also said that I was going to miss all those opportunities that were out there right now if I just waited on it and that really that really struck home with me because it's a very fast-moving industry people have deadlines all the time and people hop jobs quite a lot at least that's why there's the impression that I'm going from having my limited experience so if they have a deadline coming up they're going to want to fill that position in a couple weeks so that they can actually hear that deadline that really spurred me on into actually applying for jobs and I just kind of set like a soft target of getting a job interview by June right and the first thing I did for that was I made a really visually appealing CV and I made myself like I kind of honestly a kind of crap people phone to your website but what that allowed me to do was phone up recruiters and be like hey I'm went to eff here's some stuff that proves I'm a web dev and they look at my CV and they be like oh that's a good design and then they look at my portfolio and it be like oh he clearly knows how to build websites because this is his portfolio right and that was getting me Olivia traction and I eventually culminated in my first interview which essentially went terribly and it's barely even worth talking about like I totally bombed but I did get from that experience is the three out of four guys interviewing me didn't know any coach so I walked in and I was like oh my god I'm a god I'm gonna get whiteboard it's like I'm gonna have to know programming pads I'm gonna have to know like asynchronous JavaScript and all this high-level stuff and actually it just it just wasn't the case like the actual questions they asked about my work were pretty basic and I was able to answer them and there were lots of questions about soft skills and problem solving and stuff that's pretty easy to improve on and stuff that like is much much much easier than learning a coding language so I walked away from that and I thought the first thing I do is really improve my soft skills and really make sure I absolutely smash these interviews because some of the other guys I'm interviewing against I'm not going to take that attention to detail they're not going to address it sharply they're not going to give as good a impression and then I ended up getting my second interview and this is where I really started to get traction because I got code tested and I've been messing around with materialise at this point which is a front-end framework which allows you to kind of like throw up content really quickly and I had this 40 minute test where I had to build a form and I was absolutely crapping my pants so I basically just like copy paste to form off materialise and then I used the extra time that I had to show off all the stuff that I'd be learning with Sam about JavaScript about like persistence after local storage and stuff that was just like a little bit above and beyond your basic HTML and CSS and what that ended up what that ended up doing was allowing me to impress them enough to give me a second interview but going on from there I got Co tested again and I had to build a two page website which was a fantastic fantastic learning experience because the first time I had a design in front of me and I had to actually make something that looked like the design which is something I highly recommend you guys do actually just pick a design any design it could be like I don't know it could be like Spotify try make sparf I just on your home PC on your local you know like use live server on your Visual Studio code and try and make Spotify because I had never done that I just kind of like throwing stuff up and be like oh that's all right I'll tweak that and that's not real-world job experience like in my job we get the sign we have to make things look exactly like the design and that is what they're expecting that's where the goalpost is anyway I got this code test and I did pretty good on it because I was in a position to take a couple days off work I use materialize to throw out the front end in like two three hours poof poof poof yous guys could do that like they honestly took me like a couple hours to learn materialize really easy tech I'm sure there are people who are fantastic at it a hoot it and spend a lot more hours on it than I did but ultimately it's a very gratifying tech because you can just throw things up really quickly which is awesome because it allows you to show off your strengths and that's what it allowed me to do in that situation I did Google Maps API on that website I did form verification I did loads of awesome JavaScript stuff and I felt good about it when I was telling the guy about it in the interview afterwards and it ultimately led to me getting a job offer which I didn't take because the job is essentially just too far away but what I had then and what I think you guys should be pushing towards if you're looking to get interviews because I had a visually appealing CTP I had an understanding of what was expected in me in terms of soft skills and I had an example website and materialized actually looked like I knew what I was doing and then what that did was that just got me past all the recruiters who weren't code literate and it got me into interviews and then I could talk with the senior dev and I if I could convince him that I knew I was doing then I would get jobs and I was convinced that I and this one I was convinced that I was going to get a job eventually and it happened like I got two more job offers I actually got offered pretty good money on the one that turned down and I eventually took my job just because it had more opportunities for growth and it's pretty awesome so how can you guys really zero in on that job opportunity that you've been looking at my first point is just improve your soft skills because like I said in the video three out of four people are actually interviewing you they are not code literate so they're just looking across at the senior Devon being like does this guy actually know what he's talking about and if he gives you the nod then they're just going to be looking at how you fit into the office the impression you give off in that interview and just your general energy and if you can tick those boxes you're you know like you're 75% of the way there to landing that job and you're just going to get more opportunities than guys you can take that boxes so real book like how to win friends and influence people charisma myth by a little Olivia killed ban I think it's headache yeah and try to improve your soft skills as much as you can because it's just gonna give you more opportunities and more opportunities means you're gonna get that job interview quicker you're gonna learn how to code quicker because you can do it nine to five second point is try and organize your code as best as you can especially your CSS and for this I would recommend picking up SAS and SAS is syntactically awesome style sheets and it is a CSS front-end framework and for those of you who don't know about CSS basically CSS has a cascade so if you write a line up here that says background call it red and it aligned that Heather says background called a blue what the browser is going to read is background color blue it's just gonna overwrite the red up here so when you're maintaining a big code base what some people would do and I running this into this in my current job is they will just edit by adding things onto the bottom of the code base rather than actually like looking at what is making the problem they'll just they'll add like important tags at the bottom or they'll add extra code and that's a pain to maintain um so in my current job my senior dev doesn't really touch CSS because it's not really worth her time she's like she's doing other things that are more valuable to the company but when she has to go and touch it if you're gonna show you that you're a person that's gonna have code that's organized and easy for her or him to read then you're gonna be more appealing to the senior dev right off the bat that's my second point trial and a front-end framework on CSS like sass third point is if you can try and learn a hard programming language like JavaScript or C sharp my current job there's a lot of c-sharp around but why do a silent JavaScript and what that does is it shows that you have potential to grow it shows that you have willingness to learn something there's a little bit more difficult in HTML and CSS and it shows that you're going to take your value from here and you're going to go to here because when you're appealing to the directors and the guys who are managing you like I said they're probably not code literate but were they going to be looking at is is their investment going to be worth it because they're ultimately going to be taking a gamble on you if you're a junior dev who has no experience and they definitely took a gamble on me and I think the reason they did it was because they saw the I would be learning on the job and I would be learning in my free time and there they were gonna get a good deal on me if they invested in me over a period of years so try and show that you have decided to learn technologies that are going to be appealing to them and javascript is very appealing junkie was very hot right now if you google javascript dev job you're gonna get a lot his and also it's just an awesome language like it's really fun to learn it does loads of cool stuff like you can make iOS app you can make games you can make single page applications you can do awesome things with that it's just fun to learn so that's another great reason to learn it my fourth point kind of ties into that have a long term goal in mind and don't be afraid to voice it so in my interviews I really stress that I want to make I owe s and Android apps eventually so if you answer like developing stuff or games or if you're into developing I don't know like maybe you like Python applications or anything doesn't matter just show that you have an idea of where you want your career to go because then they're going to see that you're invested in learning and again that just comes back to the last point you're going to show that your value is going to increase in the job my last and final point is just to get yourself out there as soon as possible and to talk to other people in the community who know how to code because what you really need at this stage of your learning I imagine is context you need to know which of those videos you're looking at are actually useful to you and what text acts actually can get you into the direction that you want to go like it could be web dev it could be game dev it could be anything like which of those things are actually going to get to you towards your real-world goals the last point is just again yourself out there because web development and just coding in general is such a massive massive field that you really need context in order to learn the technologies that are actually gonna help you zero in on the job position that you want and you might not want to be a web dev you might want to be a software engineer something else but whatever it is you want try and get yourself into a situation where you can talk to people who know what it is that you need to do to get into that job market so that could be the recruiter of first off it could be the senior dev who rejects you in your first couple interviews or it could be like guys in your IT department at your current job who know a little bit of that code just try and get yourself out there and get yourself that context and if you're specifically interested in a web dev on this channel I'm going to be looking at three technologies that I've mentioned in this video that I really think can help you zero in on a junior dev position we're gonna look at materialize because it helps you build content that's going to impress the layperson the person who doesn't know how to code we're gonna look at SAS because it's going to impress the engineer that's gonna be interviewing you because they're going to know that you can actually organize your code in a good way and that you have a desire to write good clean code and we're also going to be looking at JavaScript because it's just awesome and it's my favorite language anyway thank you very very much for watching this video and if you would like to subscribe um yeah I'm sure you guys know how to do this but it's like a button below or something right anyway see you guys there

Channel: Code Creative

Views: 128,328

Rating: 4.9394832 out of 5

Keywords: how i became a web developer in 6 months, how to become a web developer, how to become a web developer in 6 months, how to become a web developer with no experience, how to become a web developer in 3 months, how to become a web developer in 2020, how i became a web developer, how to learn web development, how to learn web development for beginners

Id: 4g9yMQ1QdiY

Length: 14min 12sec (852 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 07 2019