Yea, School can't teach passionOne of the best guys at my company is completely self taught.
Software Development and Programming Careers (Official Discussion Thread)
- Thread starter Blackking
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PikaDaDon
Thunderbolt Them Suckers
Damn I can't wrap my head around that. So many companies want people with advanced college degrees. I wonder what changed?
They've probably had enough people come in with college degrees and prepared for the interview who wound up being just ok, or horrible developers that they don't know what they're looking for anymore? lol
I want to start taking online courses (for beginners) on network security and such, what's a good site / course to take?
I'd start here
Pluralsight | Unlimited Online Developer, IT and Creative Training
also, be on the lookout for the heavily discounted Udemy courses.
jus copped this one Definitely leave feedback here after you complete this course man!
I've been learning so much this year and last year, it's mind-bending. Been dealing with Angular 2, rxjs, ngrx, and selenium for work and playing around with phaser for game development and node for serverside at home.
What's the most valuable thing you've learned over these two years?
The most valuable thing I've learned is to deal with frustration and to stop comparing yourself to others. You have to accept that this is a 'learning' business, meaning that you're in a business that requires you to constantly absorb new information. This can be very frustrating, and you will often feel dumb and befuddled, so in order to overcome, you have to train your mind to not become overloaded. There are countless amount of things you won't know. You have to accept that you don't know everything and you also have to be humble enough to ask for help and not let your lack of knowledge on certain areas discourage you from progressing.
Something else that is important is just wading through the swamp. There will be times when you are completely confused and befuddled, but instead of throwing your hands up in frustration, sometimes you might have to take a step back and take a break, and then come back to what you're learning and just dissect things piece by piece, and slowly, but surely, that fog of frustration and confusion will clear up, and what used to seem impossible soon becomes second nature.
Another important aspect is to load your github up with your projects and maybe even create a twitter or some other social network and possibly even a blog. I've been bad about keeping up with all of that, but you want to put your work out for people to see. It creates opportunities for recruiters and people in general to see your work and possibly give you an opportunity.
Another important thing I've learned? Don't be a language whore. I was doing that for a while... trying to learn all of these different languages, and while I appreciate the perspective it gave me, I just feel at a certain point, you can get stuck just 'learning languages' and never making anything. It makes no sense to have knowledge of 10 different languages, but to never have deployed a site or made some sort of application. At some point, you're just going to have to pick one or two languages and just focus on making stuff, and after you've made so many things that you get bored, then you can come back and mess around in other languages.
Let me drop one more piece of information... This is one of the most important ones. DON'T be cheap with your learning and advancement of your skills. I often see a lot of guys running around looking for 'free' stuff or doing any and everything they can to avoid paying for information, but somehow a lot of these guys have a closet full of jordans or they're pushing some expensive car around. You have to look at materials that advance your skills as an investment. It will make you a TON more money than what you put in. I could have saved my chump change I had prior to this job, but I ended up buying a lot of books and courses and I went through them and ended up with a job now that pays nearly triple what I used to get.
I have hundreds of courses on udemy and hundreds of books on programming. Obviously, there is no way I can read them all or go through all of those courses, but all of that money is money well spent since it will give me knowledge to either get a significant pay increase down the line, whether it be at the company I'm at or another company or it will give me the knowledge to start my own company. I'm not saying for anyone to spend the amount of money I've spent on this material, but what I am saying is don't try to cheap out and look for free stuff because you want to give yourself the best knowledge possible. Increasing your knowledge and skills significantly by exposing yourself to the best resources is going to net you way more money than the amount you would save by trying to be as cheap as possible.
My key suggestions? Take advantage of those udemy $10 and $15 dollar sales. Buy a kindle and grab some interesting programming books. If you want to go the free route, look at coursera and check out some of those courses. You could also do a subscription at lynda or pluralsight or frontendmasters. The key is to expose yourself to the best information possible and to look at the cost as an INVESTMENT. You forego a little money now to make much more money later.
I have hundreds of courses on udemy and hundreds of books on programming. Obviously, there is no way I can read them all or go through all of those courses, but all of that money is money well spent since it will give me knowledge to either get a significant pay increase down the line, whether it be at the company I'm at or another company or it will give me the knowledge to start my own company. I'm not saying for anyone to spend the amount of money I've spent on this material, but what I am saying is don't try to cheap out and look for free stuff because you want to give yourself the best knowledge possible. Increasing your knowledge and skills significantly by exposing yourself to the best resources is going to net you way more money than the amount you would save by trying to be as cheap as possible.
My key suggestions? Take advantage of those udemy $10 and $15 dollar sales. Buy a kindle and grab some interesting programming books. If you want to go the free route, look at coursera and check out some of those courses. You could also do a subscription at lynda or pluralsight or frontendmasters. The key is to expose yourself to the best information possible and to look at the cost as an INVESTMENT. You forego a little money now to make much more money later.
I dropped a bunch of applications at Microsoft last night 
. I learned the limit is 10 per 24 hour period. I still have 4 or 5 more positions to apply to.
. I learned the limit is 10 per 24 hour period. I still have 4 or 5 more positions to apply to.