How To Learn To Code When You Have No Time And No Money - Codeland 2018

hi hello hi my name is Colleen I am super excited to be here this is my first time speaking ever so please laugh at all of my jokes thank you thank you I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my journey learning to code with no time and no money I studied Electrical Engineering in college and I graduated and I got an amazing job at the hottest tech company of the time I lived in Chicago a great city with my best friend I was also engaged to a fiancee who happened to be in the military but I didn't think too much about that because you know we weren't married yet so I thought life would kind of be like this but in reality life is more like this you live where you're told to live and the service member is gone a lot but I quit my job in Chicago packed up and I moved to the military base in Norfolk Virginia I got the only job I could find there in Norfolk Virginia which was working for a very large defense contractor and it was not a good fit we did a lot of we let what we liked to call paperwork engineering and that's a lot of Excel and a lot of bureaucracy I had become an engineer because I wanted to create things and I was not creating anything I was pretty unhappy in my job but I didn't have a lot of options so I got another job hoping that would solve the problem that was also in defense contracting and spoiler alert still hated it so I stuck it out because I didn't know what else I could do but I did Google Jobs I can do remotely and I kept coming across all of these coding success stories have you ever seen this headline hmm or maybe this one or this one of course I could learn how to write objective-c publish an app to the App Store and make a million dollars how hard could it be so I kind of came up with it vague game plan which is just what I said step one learn Objective C so I started learning iOS in 2011 it was a very slow process because like many of you I had a full time job at the time I was also pregnant and growing a human is really hard so I was super tired so I slowly I slowly made progress over that over the course of the year with continual work and eventually I published an app to the App Store and then I sat back and waited for my money to roll it I'm sure you can see where this is going I made $63 thank you thank you oh but it gets better what they don't tell you is to be part of the Developer Program you have to pay a hundred dollars annually so is actually negative $37 and I also couldn't find any freelancing work this is back when what is now up work was Elance and people were putting things up there like $200 for an iOS app like maybe $200 an hour but the amount of work that goes into an iOS app is definitely worth more than $200 so I hadn't really found any freelancing work and I had been working at this for a year I was kind of burned to half right and I was kind of demoralized I was like this I put so much time and effort in this and I'm not making any progress I really felt like I wasn't any closer to my goal than I had been so I'd like to tell you that I pressed on but that's not what happened I went back to my cubicle I had had a baby so I had a newborn and my husband deployed and a deployment for those of you not familiar is when the military service member leaves for four to eight months and goes somewhere in the world that's dangerous that we as spouses we don't even know where they are it's really hard for the person who stays home I had thought about giving the coding gig another shot it was always in the back of my mind but like I'm sure for many of you as well like life happens right I had more children there were more deployments and just stuff when my second son was born I decided to stay home and I always had that dream though of working remotely and then I start almost started again in 2014 but a very close friend of ours died in an accident and you know that just kind of like stops your whole life so there was no energy at that time to learn a new skill so fast forward to 2016 so remember I started this journey in 2011 so it's been five years and I was ready to go back to work and so I figured I had one more shot to really make this work or I was back to my cubicle so this time I approached it with a little more thought and practicality I started with what did I want to do I this wasn't a financial decision for me because I was actually making really good money at my last job this was a passion decision so I had to figure out what I wanted to do and then I had to have flexible and remote work because of the military were up for new orders every two years so there's a lot of moves on our horizon and of course I did want to make money so finding a well-paying job was important Swift had just come out at this time or around this time so I figured I was going to be starting over either way I was either going to start new with Swift or start with web I selected web because I figured everyone needs a website maybe not everyone needs an iOS app so I googled how to become a web developer has anyone googled how to become a web developer Wow there are so many it is totally overwhelming as a newbie how do you pick front-end back-end full-stack WordPress Squarespace and then you have to narrow it down to a language and a framework so the first thing I did is I actually took skill crushes intro to web developer it wasn't a bootcamp it was just like a prep course and that did a good job of kind of showing me what I wanted to do and what I didn't want to do and what I learned from that was I did not want to be a front-end developer I wanted to be a Ruby on Rails developer but while I'm taking this class I saw a blog post on how to make money while learning to code and the blog post was all about being a wordpress developer so it would have been an awesome career path for someone who wanted to be a WordPress developer but I didn't but I got like sucked into the hype and so I started charging people like fifty and a hundred dollars to customize the CSS on their WordPress sites which was a total waste of time for me because didn't want to do it didn't enjoy doing it I didn't actually make that much money because if you're charging someone a hundred bucks to customize CSS you're not thinking about the time you spend talking to them figuring out what they want you know all that so it just wasn't it dancing me in the direction I wanted to go so my first lesson would be pick something that aligns with your long term career goals I think for many of us this change is a passion project right like you're getting into coding because you're excited about it and you love it so decide within that huge aperture what do you love about it because there's a lot of different ways to specialize and then then you have to figure out a language and a framework that I know is overwhelming I feel like that's a question I get asked a lot is like which one should I pick especially those of you in the JavaScript community so I would say pick one and just get really really good at it because once you're really really good at something it's easier to transition into other frameworks and libraries and stay focused even if you decide to be a rails developer but even like Sauron is like no no js' is the future focus on what you've decided focus on what you've selected on what you've selected and then you can like I said then it's a lot easier to switch so here I was I had taken my intro class and I have decided as I said that I wanted to be a rails developer so then I took a couple classes on Coursera this is back on Coursera was free sorry I did my free 30 days on treehouse but then that ran out so I did my free prep on Flatiron but then I was done with that I did a couple things two courses and right around the time I was learning what a for-loop was for the fifth time I realized haha I'm not making any progress I would finish my free trial period and then I just jumped to a new learning platform I had made apps but I was it was like the to-do app over and over and over right so I wasn't growing I was just bouncing around with no direction and then somehow I was introduced to Michael hurdles book and I stopped jumping around when I found this book and I read the whole entire book and I think this book works for me because one that's my learning style I like books and it goes very it's very very much in depth and that's kind of what I needed was one really challenging in-depth resource and so that leaves me to lesson to just don't be distracted by shiny learning platforms when you're learning to code Google knows you're learning to code and they're add sensors are popping up all these ads for all of these different learning platforms and a lot of them are really really good learning platforms I don't want to detract from that but doing three videos in each platform or waiting till your free trial runs out is really not an effective way to get depth in a language so I would suggest picking one and sticking with it so I knew to be successful in this field I needed to meet new people in the field I had tried meetup.com back in 2008 when I first moved to Virginia and I had met a bunch of weirdos so I was a little I was a little hesitant to jump back on the meetup.com bandwagon but I heard that was the way to meet people so I saw there was a Ruby on Rails meetup and I saw I you know internet stalked the meetup leader obviously and I saw that he worked for custom Inc a company that creates t-shirts and very interestingly it was the same company my husband had used to raise money for our the widow of our friends who died and my husband and actually had a great experience with this company when we were going through a really hard time so that kind of felt fortuitous so I went to the meetup very nervously and there was exactly one other Ruby developer there but uh oh and I had no idea what he was talking about but he was super supportive super knowledgeable and he told me about this thing called Twitter obviously I had heard of Twitter I don't live in a cave but I had never I had never used it and I actually had to Google how does Twitter work and this video popped up it was like Twitter for grandmas and I watched it it was very informative so I got on Twitter and I had three followers and one of them is that Twitter bot that has to follow you but whatever and so I stumbled upon the hundred days of code hashtag and so I started tweeting and I didn't follow the hundred days of code rule I just tweeted when I coded and tried to make it a habit and then I found code newbie and then I found moms can code and then I could found vets can code and I found all of these amazing communities that kept me disciplined and motivated and lifted me up when I was down and celebrated my accomplishments with me and that has been such a game-changer for this journey so here I was I was on Twitter I was attending meetups and I had made a few apps obviously I knew everything about Ruby ever so I started to look for a job and I noticed in job listings they wanted someone with experience but it's of course that chicken and the egg problem right like you can't get a job without experience you can't get experienced without a job so what to do this has kind of been a theme of this conference which I didn't know writing this talk but I got involved an open source open source was the gateway for me to get involved in big projects with real people making a real impact it is hard and scary I know I read blog post about how to get involved an open source beforehand and some of the repos actually have like these good first-time contributor labels I was fortunate than that I found operation code an organization trying to get veterans into software careers and the community surrounding that is super supportive so I picked an issue I knew how to do it was like crud operations on an endpoint it's like awesome I did a great job they were so impressed like crushing life right and then I went on to my second issue and I had no idea what I was doing and I worked on it in a vacuum for a long time and I'm gonna be honest like it had been like five or six years by this point I was kind of ready to quit again I had been on this journey so long and I felt like I had come so far but I still wasn't good enough but I did something different this time I asked for help this was the first time I had asked for help and guess what people helped me shocker and this began some of these amazing mentorship relationships I still have today so this leads me to lesson three get involved in a big project and develop real relationships going to meetups is hard I get it although you're all here so it's got to be easier than coming to a conference and these are your people right you want to be a developer these are your people you have to grow your network I have to hire a babysitter so I can go to meetups and it's still worth it get involved in open-source you've been hearing it all weekend for me that's really what really propelled me forward in my career that was my game-changer once I was an active contributor to open source doing hard ish things that gave me the confidence to start applying for remote freelance work and then I got one client and then another and then another so let's revisit here's the headline from the first slide this was not my reality I really hope it's your reality but if not this is more what my headline might look at might look like you know I think I wrote my bio in the pamphlet like six to eight months ago and I think at the time I was just working with that one client I mentioned since I have written that I have had many many clients and I actually turned someone down just last week so the work is out there you just have to get the skills to be able to do it it took me a long time and I'm still very much a work in progress but I am finally on the path to having the career I want and it feels awesome [Applause]

Channel: CodeNewbie

Views: 423,827

Keywords: codenewbie, codenewbie podcast, codeland, codeland conference, tech conference, coding conference, conference talk, learn to code

Id: xvV7OI1jdu4

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2018