Pathway To Success
I’m contacted almost daily by current students or those recently finished studying as well as those considering a career change into IT, specifically into development-based roles. I remember what it was like at university, thinking and chatting with mates about what our job would look like. I was fortunate enough to spend some time with a Melbourne consultancy working on telco project during uni holidays and that really opened my eyes as to what is involved in the job I’d likely go into.
What is the core of our role? It’s problem solving! Problem solving is something I love to do. Fixing things, understanding how they work and how best to use them. How was I able to apply that to a job in IT? Through hard work, lots of study and most importantly constantly practicing my craft. When I was a Sysadmin and learning I had up to 15 machines setup at home that I had cobbled together from spares. When I was a tester I spent more time automating and fixing than I did writing tests cases. At that time the test cases were in word table format, so I didn’t have to do as much manual work. When I moved into a dev role it wasn’t because my boss thought I might be good at it, it was because I had been coding non-stop looking for the opportunity to move up. That learning curve has never stopped as we must continue to learn, explore new languages, new techniques and new services.
So what’s the point of this post? I thought I’d put together a list of free online courses and learning activities where once completed I would be confident to support and recommend someone for a Junior/starting role as a developer. (I’ll edit and update it but I thought I’d get it out tonight as a starting point) You’ll notice it contains both front end and backend, there is no choice here you must do both. You will find that you’ll specialise but it’s important to understand both sets of fundamentals. It’s like going through school and saying oh I don’t like maths I only need English because I’ll be a writer, well you’d grow up not knowing how to pay a bill. IMO you need to do both so you can count your money.
Anyway, enough of the story here is the list. Keen to hear feedback and feel free to provide a PR on the blog for additional courses that are worthwhile. Completed these 4 freeCodeCamp courses in full, I want to see the code committed to GitHub.
- https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/responsive-web-design/
- https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/javascript-algorithms-and-data-structures/
- https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/apis-and-microservices/
- https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/quality-assurance/#quality-assurance-projects
Studied for, sat and passed your AWS Cloud Practitioner. https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-cloud-practitioner/
Completed all but the advanced portion of: https://learngitbranching.js.org/
Completed this short course on Python https://www.kaggle.com/learn/python
Design, build and host a website with a real domain as an online resume.
- https://cloudresumechallenge.dev/instructions/
Have at least 5 random projects on GitHub that have documented README.md and are runnable with at least 2 of them having a video walk through. EG tic tac toe game, random image generator, some type of web scraper or aggregator for example.
Have completed at least 2 of these challenges providing the GitHub repository and fully documented the solution
- https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/cloudguruchallenge-improve-application-performance-using-amazon-elasticache
- https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/how-to-build-a-netflix-style-recommendation-engine-with-amazon-sagemaker
- https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/cloudguruchallenge-python-aws-etl
- https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/cloudguruchallenge-machine-learning-on-aws
Yes it’s a lot of work, but it is achievable in 6 or so months even with a full time job/study. Achieve this and you’ll thank me for it as you’ll have learnt a ton of skill and muscle memory for HTML, JavaScript and Python. You will understand the basics of Cloud Computing and be Certified, have a rich portfolio to show future potential employers and have really gotten used to googling when things don’t work and when google doesn’t help, you will have found the communities that exist that do!