How to Become a Developer | My Story

hi everyone it's nikki welcome back to my channel i heart game dev a channel about game development today i want to take a little bit of time to talk about something a little different but still related to game development i want to talk about how i got into development itself how did i go from knowing nothing about coding to becoming a full-time engineer and keeping my part-time job as a fitness instructor and becoming a hobbyist game developer today that's what we're going to talk about so when i was 25 i decided that i wanted to learn something new and that thought was actually provoked by one of my best friends who asked if i was interested in learning a program he was just graduating from university with a computer science degree and he said to me hey are you interested in learning the code i told him yeah i was so i gave this online course that he recommended to me through mit a shot it was a free online course and i loved every minute of it in fact it's really what told me that i wanted to do this professionally so the course was nine weeks long and it took about 14 hours per week that might be a lot of time but you know it was honestly worth it because i wouldn't be where i am today without it i'm going to put a link in the description so that if anyone here is interested in learning the course is still going on and all you have to do is sign up for the next session and you can do it yourself now that course was just the first step into me becoming a full-time engineer i also ended up going to a boot camp called app academy and that boot camp was 12 weeks long and taught me all the fundamentals that i needed to know to do this full time so let's take a little bit of time to talk about the bootcamp itself what was that experience like the bootcamp was 12 weeks long so three months and it was 80 plus hours a week at this point i had to stop completely being a full-time fitness instructor and this was all i was able to focus on all i did was go i would wake up i would go to the boot camp and i would learn as much as i can i'd come home i would do the homework that they assigned i would study for the exams because if you got if you failed one of the exams you were kicked out of the boot camp and that was not something that i wanted to happen fortunately it didn't happen but it was pretty intense for three months that's how long that lasted but with that being said i learned so much i actually can't imagine ever having an experience like that where you learn so much in such a short period of time and of course i did make a few friends while i was there there was about 40 people in the cohort and we all felt like we were in it together trying to scrape by and not get kicked out of the boot camp but fortunately i i did make it through the hulk bootcamp and by the time the bootcamp was over i knew ruby and i knew javascript which are two programming languages that are sought after in the job application community so two months of the actual boot camp were dedicated to learning and then one month of the bootcamp was only dedicated to building your portfolio so that you are ready to send out applications and ready to apply into the void that is the job application process i will tell you that the boot camp promises that you will get a job within the first year of you searching for a job after you graduate and the job that you're applying for is supposed to have a fairly high salary that's the promise of the boot camp but with that being said when you start actually applying and sending out applications it's going to take a long time it's going to take time unless you know people unless you have friends in the industry it's going to take you time to actually it's going to take you time to actually get a job in the industry and that's okay it took me about five months to actually get a yes to anything that i was applying for i must have sent out 200 to 300 to 400 applications um within the first few months and they were all either rejected or i just didn't get a response which i think everybody says that it feels even worse than getting a rejection because then you just don't know but what got me through that was a combination of actually still having my fitness job which kept me sane and kept me feel like i was doing something productive and i would always tell myself that all i needed was one yes all i needed was to get to the yes and the only way that that does not happen the only way that i don't become a software engineer professionally is if i stop trying and i still tell everyone who i know who goes into this industry in a similar fashion to me that's what i tell them all the time is the only way that you don't become an engineer is if you stop trying so that's my big advice for this whole thing if you take away anything from this video but again after five months i did finally get an internship it was unpaid but i worked on something i really thought was cool and had potential that company is still going there's a startup and so i'm really excited to see where that goes but i got a part-time job not too long after that actually paid me money and that was awesome and then a few months later i had my first full-time job i'm a react native engineer right now which means i work with mobile applications and i love my job i think it's awesome it's still something that i care about very much and you know game development is something that i do now because the job that i do have rewards me with free time and stability and that's something that i think you can never take for granted now the process of me going from zero to full time was actually about a full year and a half so i started the mit course in may of 2017 and i got my first full-time job in the industry in early november late october of 2018. so that's just a time frame of how long it could take i know people who did it faster i know people who did it slower but you know everybody has their own their own path and their own way of doing things so i just wanted to take a little bit of time today to explain to you my story i always like telling it because i think that if i can do it then so can you and if you can do it then anyone can do it you know i like to have the idea that we are all very similar in that if we are disciplined and we work hard at something that we can really change our own paths and own careers and head in the right direction that we want to i also wanted to explain it because i know that some people who get into game development don't have a background in programming and you know i didn't have a background in programming but now i do it professionally and even if you don't want to do it professionally you can still learn how to do c-sharp programming and use it with unity but i was just thinking that if you saw my story that maybe you could also give it a shot and i'll put links in the description to the resources that i use i'll show you app academy and i'll show you the mit course and maybe maybe some of the people who find this video will give it a shot and who knows maybe it's going to change their lives too so that's all i really wanted to say today i know it's very different than the tutorials that i do but those will take about a month's time each and i don't really have the patience to only put out a video every month i want to put out more content maybe i'll make them smaller or maybe i'll make more videos like this but for today i hope you enjoyed it thank you so much for supporting the channel it really does mean a lot and i'll see you guys in the next video

Channel: iHeartGameDev

Views: 5,124

Keywords: Indie Game Development, iheartgamedev, learn game development, game dev for beginners, how to become a developer, how i became a developer, zero to full time developer, how to learn software engineering, learn to program, how to code for beginners, how I learned to code, full time developer, how to become a software developer, learn to program games, learn coding for games, learn to code, how to code, how to become a full time developer, how to become a software engineer

Id: 3cBnGQLs32E

Length: 7min 21sec (441 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2020