• Breaking News

    Wednesday, February 27, 2019

    Home Unlabelled It happened - I got an offer from my dream job as a self taught developer! web developers

    It happened - I got an offer from my dream job as a self taught developer! web developers

    February 27, 2019

    It happened - I got an offer from my dream job as a self taught developer! web developers

    It happened - I got an offer from my dream job as a self taught developer!

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 08:50 AM PST

    Hi /r/webdev! I never thought I'd be able to make one of these posts, but here we are. I want to share some of my story, my background, and some tips on job searching and learning independently. Remember: it IS possible, and your hard work WILL pay off. Sorry about this long post.

    Disclaimer: This is just my story - your experience may be totally different based on lots of different factors.

    I recently accepted an offer as a Front End Developer at a top tech company in Chicago. I do not have any development experience, but I was a "Digital Marketing Consultant" for 2 years when I was a teen at a local business. I'll touch more on this later. I am 100% self taught, and balanced self-learning while working full time 40 hours per week. I took a few coding related classes at my local community college, but I definitely did not need to to land this job and I'll tell you why momentarily.

    General Advice

    • Practice every day. If you get one thing away from this post, being consistent should be it. Have you ever heard about the Non-Zero Day? This concept is pretty much solely responsible for my success. It is HARD to find motivation - I get it. After work, all I want to do most of the time is snuggle up in bed, eat some pizza rolls, then pass out until I have to go to my crappy job in the morning. Even on my worst "lazy days", I'd promise myself one thing. Read an article, watch one 5 minute YouTube video, or do one section on FreeCodeCamp. Something. The good thing about doing one "non-zero" thing is that 15 minutes turns into 30 minutes and then you find this cool new method you want to try and then oh no it's been 3 hours. Sometimes it doesn't turn into anything besides the one article you read, and that's okay.
    • Use many different learning resources. I'll list a lot of resources that helped me at the end of this post. However, the most important thing about resources is you need to use a lot of them. Don't just use videos, because as an irl dev you're going to be reading a lot. Don't just use docs/articles when learning something brand new because the concept might be best described visually. Don't skip a section in a tutorial/article because "you know it already". You have to know it a hundred times over, so learn it again!
    • Be patient. In total, on and off, I have been learning to code on an employable level since 2014. I started to take it seriously about 8-10 months ago, but that's after I had a solid foundation going. I'm not telling you it's going to take 5 years, but these stories of people taking off 6 months to code from 0 to 100 are not attainable for most people. Those posts always made me feel annoyed af honestly. Be nice to yourself.
    • Apply to every job you see. The listing that ultimately landed me an offer asked for 3-5 years of development experience, yet they hired me as a junior. Apply to EVERYTHING.
    • Focus your learning around job postings. If you're learning to code to get a job, learn what people are looking for in your area! A nice detailed job posting is the perfect web developer roadmap.

    What Really Mattered

    • Passion. My new employer said the main reason they hired me was because I was genuinely interested in code, and made it a part of my life. I think if you show that you put your hard work in because you genuinely like solving problems and talking to computers, it'll go a long way.
    • Portfolio. My portfolio wasn't even as complete as most people I see on this sub. If you'd like to view it, this is it. I just tried to use my portfolio website itself to show off as much skill as I had in design and development. Another thing my employer loved in my interview was my blog (made with Jekyll!). Even though I only have three posts, it showed I can go back and evaluate myself. They asked a lot of questions based off of it. As far as projects go, I have a lot of little experiments on my codepen/github but only one full project. I didn't want to include any of the stuff I built through tutorials. My project is a New Tab page made for myself as a Chrome Extension (shoutout to /r/startpages). I also had one website on my resume which I listed, but it was OLD. It was a Bootstrap static site I made for a local restaurant. They especially loved a blog post I made on it, where I went back and revisited my site and re-evaluated it as if I made it with all of my knowledge now. They liked that I could be constructively critical on my old work and showed that I was able to grow and learn.
    • Experience. Well hey, triforcepizza! Didn't you say you didn't have in house dev experience? Yep. But I had experience in freelancing and marketing, and I can say that definitely did help. I'll tell you why. I was interviewed by 8 different people from different areas - content, social media, design, etc and I was able to talk to them about their respected area. I don't know everything about everything, but having a basic idea about each area of the digital ecosystem helped so much. Even me freelancing a simple site for a local business showed I was able to communicate with a client/stakeholder, listen to their needs, then create a product that met those needs. Freelance when you can! Even if it is something simple, like a site for a local nonprofit.
    • Programming Theory. Learn your data structures and basics, people. I can't tell you enough. Find out what a data structure is, a parameter, how a computer works in general, all of that good stuff. Before I took a class on basic CS concepts and programming, I was just hacking away trying to learn JavaScript but wondering why nothing made sense. If you're stuck and you haven't done this yet, do it now. I took a class at my community college that wasn't even that great but it helped so much. I recommend taking CS50 now, that seems like a MUCH better version of the class I took. It is an absolute necessity. And while we're at it, learn basics about the JavaScript language itself before you try any fancy libraries. Actually, just learn it anyway. This article is so helpful.
    • Soft Skills. Work on your people skills! 50% of cracking the coding interview is being friendly, kind, accommodating, and approachable IMO. Companies are not only looking for how well you code but how well you work with a team and fit in with company culture. It's almost more important than your coding knowledge as a junior.
    • Technology I learned: HTML, CSS, a CSS Preprocessor (I use Sass), Git, vanilla JavaScript, basic PHP, and design/layout basics. Bonus points for npm and task running.

    What Kind of Didn't Matter and You Can Get Along Without but It Still Helped

    • Formal Education. - I have an associates degree in general art, and the coursework included design courses and some basic programming stuff. My employer didn't care about my degree much - they just wanted to know that I know what I'm talking about. A lot of people in the office just have high school diplomas, and this one other agency I interviewed at employed two HS drop outs!
    • Experience. Hey, haven't I seen this before? You had it in the 'What Mattered' category! What gives? I'm getting there ok!! What people care most about is that you can solve problems. Of course my 2 years of marketing experience played a huge part, but I believe they would have hired me without it as long as I had SOME client skills. You can get this by freelancing. Find a job on craigslist, freelancer, or even use Catch A Fire. It connects you with nonprofits that need web work done. So you're helping someone and gaining valuable client experience! It'll be hard work. If you're working full time, it's going to be difficult to balance freelancing on top of that. But if you really can't do it, you might still be ok. Another position I interviewed for was straight up looking for someone junior level that had no experience whatsoever - they preferred it that way, so they could mold the person into who they wanted. It's all about finding the right position so apply, apply, apply.

    Invaluable Resources

    I hope this helped someone. If you put in the work, it's possible - but don't forget to ask for help! The interview process I went through was quite intensive and it had 2 coding tests. If anyone has any other questions about it, going on other interviews, applying for jobs, etc please PM me!

    Lastly, I'd just like to thank this community, /r/learnprogramming, Google, and Stack Overflow. I am constantly in awe of all of you amazing people who spend dozens of hours of your time to produce free content on the internet. This post is just a fraction of what I wish I could give back. My gratitude is endless.

    EDIT: The outpouring of support has been incredible, thank you all. I have edited my list of resources to include a blog I love + my own personal spreadsheet of webdev resources sorted by category. I update it every once and awhile. I hope it helps!!

    submitted by /u/triforcepizza
    [link] [comments]

    I'm a teacher, and I made this tool to show students why a 12 column grid is better than 10

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 09:50 AM PST

    Most frequently mentioned words in the top 1000 StackOverflow questions tagged #JavaScript. [x-post /r/DataArt]

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 10:14 AM PST

    What was your starting salary?

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 02:54 PM PST

    Built a little tool mostly for myself but maybe you guys will enjoy it too

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 07:44 AM PST

    What is your React/Node project structure?

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 10:02 AM PST

    I've seen client and server directories with react and node apps respectively that are independent but communicate with each other and I've seen public that holds webpack builds and src that has client and server in it.

    Does incorporating Docker change your structure?

    submitted by /u/DTheDeveloper
    [link] [comments]

    Dynamically Create File Links?

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 04:48 PM PST

    Good day everyone.

    ​

    Is there a solution to generating dynamic links to point to files. Something that only works at the time of the link generation, say in a user account. The problem I need to solve is being able to make dirrect link to files like

    site.com/files/project.pdf

    I need to obscure the file into something like

    site.com/files/project_sd78989dh890sd908sd90f87g0s98d7f

    And this file will not be available if you just take the 2nd link and copy paste it into the address bar.

    This link would not work without logging in. In fact, after the user has logged into an account and a new link would be generated when as "Download This File" Button would be pressed.

    ​

    Running a PHP server with mySQL Database for authentication

    submitted by /u/TheConceptBoy
    [link] [comments]

    Most frequently mentioned words in the top 1000 StackOverflow questions tagged #JavaScript. [x-post /r/DataArt]

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 04:08 PM PST

    I'm trying to learn frontend/backend interaction and i'm not sure what database to use.

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 09:10 AM PST

    So basically, I'm trying to build a flask app that lets users to to a webpage where their mouse position is shown as a dot to all the users viewing the webpage at the time. So it'd be like agar.io but with just the dots moving around a blank webpage.

    I'm comfortable building the frontend part that reads the current user's mouse position in JavaScript, but i'm not sure how to send the data back to a database on the server, plus it seems like an SQLAlchemy database (that i've been using for user logins and such) would be too slow, but i'm not sure of any alternatives.

    Finally, i'm not sure how to make it update every user's mouse position constantly either. I could make it so it would update whenever the user moved their mouse but then if they left it still they couldn't see any other movement. Any advice?

    submitted by /u/dovahkiinow
    [link] [comments]

    What are the most in-demand products in Web development right now?

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 05:48 AM PST

    The web development field is so broad and so saturated. What are clients really looking for right now?

    submitted by /u/Zdragon1
    [link] [comments]

    Slate hot reloading?

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 02:17 PM PST

    Just got into the Slate framework (https://shopify.github.io/slate/) and it looks like there's no ootb hot-reloading, even though Browsersync loads (albeit blank).

    Have scoured for a source, but only see a bug report that ages old.

    Has anyone seen a fix for this?

    submitted by /u/_hugerobots_
    [link] [comments]

    Amazon SNS or Pinpoint vs Twilio for confirmation SMS messages?

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 02:09 PM PST

    I need to be able to send confirmation SMS messages to customers and receive the customer's response in the backend.

    The use cases for SNS and Pinpoint are not all that clear to me. Are these the right choice or is something like Twilio a better solution?

    submitted by /u/Web-Dude
    [link] [comments]

    We changed the domain name of our 100k+ page SEO-driven site. Here's what happened: (Part 1)

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 10:15 AM PST

    Coupon/Voucher system for students

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 01:55 PM PST

    I am a community college professor and want to give students a "get out homework free code" to use one time per semester per class they have with me. The thought is give out a code for the course and then let them redeem it online. It would be associated with their college user name or email address to keep track of submissions and to make sure they don't duplicate.

    Is there something pre-packaged maybe as a PHP script? Or maybe Google Docs or Airtable? I can grab a class list with username or email addresses pretty easy each semester so there should not be a ton of overhead each semester.

    Thanks for any help

    Dennis

    submitted by /u/inetguy
    [link] [comments]

    Creating a secure page link?

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 01:53 PM PST

    So one of my clients have this request where they would like to have the visitor enter a password before their site can be accessed. No problem, I've got that covered. Here's when things get more interesting. My client would like to have the visitor enter the site without any restriction if the visitor has come from one of their subsidiary sites.

    ​

    For example, Site A is the parent site and Site B is a subsidiary of it. If the site visitor has come to site A by clicking on one of its links on Site B, they should not be required any sort of password restriction. Otherwise, they'll be asked for a password.

    ​

    Help?

    submitted by /u/Syed7860
    [link] [comments]

    The most up to date webdev course

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 09:56 AM PST

    So what's the most up to date webdev course? I already know some HTML & CSS, I'd like to learn either of: JS, ES6 Node, React, PHP, doesn't really matter which.

    submitted by /u/Keintroufe
    [link] [comments]

    Is there a frontend framework that's a bit like Vaadin in the sense that you can just shoot serialized data at it and it builds views from that?

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 03:30 AM PST

    So, Vaadin is this Java web framework where you write the frontend completely in Java. It gives a spring-like API for constructing GUIs. The project itself comes with some kind of JS kernel, which gets JSON from the server and renders that into widgets, but you don't actually write any html or javascript yourself. Sort of gives you the Node experience of having the same language on the client on the server, but with Java.

    I do data wrangling in Python, but I am going to need to turn one of my projects into an API in the future, and eventually also make a web client. Writing a JSON API in Python is obviously no problem, but, as far as I know, there isn't anything quite like Vaadin where even DOM logic is implemented in Python.

    My thought is that maybe there is some kind of half-way thing. A JS library that provides all the widgets and can kind of build the document out of serialized data without having to write any client-side code? is that a thing?

    submitted by /u/ninjaaron
    [link] [comments]

    I made a website, mobile app and web extension to easily keep all my tech content in one place. But also crowdsource my tech curation by being able to follow other developers using the tool and some team integrations with slack

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 01:16 AM PST

    Using CloudFlare Polish or Imagify for image optimization

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 09:20 AM PST

    In an attempt to make my load times better, I'm trying to determine the best route for compressing images on my photography blog. I don't have a ton on there, but it's not as fast as it could be. I've looked into Imagify, or upgrading to the Pro Cloudflare plan to utilize Polish and Mirage. I'm already using WPRocket.

    ​

    I should add - my site is a pretty low traffic site, all things considered. I average maybe 50 visitors a month, if that. I'd still like to improve my load time though. Who's used Polish (or Imagify) and seen improvements?

    ​

    Thank you.

    submitted by /u/bgusto01
    [link] [comments]

    What tool was used to acheive the code demo on this site?

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 12:51 PM PST

    Quick question about JSP

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 12:51 PM PST

    Hi guys, just a quick question.

    From what I know about JSP, I can set up a project with index.jsp in an Eclipse Dynamic Web Project and the URL will map out like localhost:8080/project-name

    Subsequently something like page2.jsp will map out to localhost:8080/project-name/page2.jsp

    How do I map those two pages to simply "project-name.com" for index.jsp and "project-name.com/page2" for page2.jsp?

    submitted by /u/terabix
    [link] [comments]

    Google Excluding Pages from Index

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 06:41 AM PST

    I'm no pro, so please forgive my ignorance.

    Google is only showing my home page as being in the index, with all other pages being excluded due to a "crawl anomaly". When I fetch the pages as Google, it states that the pages are being redirected. I am not knowingly or intentionally sending any redirects to Google on my end. I'm on a shared hosting account, so aside from cPanel, I can't do much (or mess up much) on the server.

    Here is the response I get when I fetch as Google, I changed the URL for privacy, but note that it is sending a 301 and redirecting the page to itself?

    Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2019 23:49:06 GMT Server: Apache Location: http://foo.com/bar/ Content-Length: 239 Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <html><head> <title>301 Moved Permanently</title> </head><body> <h1>Moved Permanently</h1> <p>The document has moved <a href="http://foo.com/bar/">here</a>.</p> </body></html>

    Here is my .htaccess, I commented out the "www" redirect thinking it may help, but it didn't.

    # Do not allow auto-index Options All -Indexes # Initialize mod_rewrite RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / # Redirect WWW Traffic # RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*) [NC] # RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L] # Bootstrap RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [L]

    Any help or advice in resolving this matter will be greatly appreciated.

    submitted by /u/iwtwyad
    [link] [comments]

    HTML slides without frameworks, just CSS

    Posted: 27 Feb 2019 04:59 AM PST
    Read more
    at

    No comments:

    Post a Comment