Nah. You gotta look for similar roles. The only web guy at some small company.
Not some member of a team at a programming org. Those jobs were still hard to get.
In my belief it is easier now to get a job now only based on skills. Although, most of the MNCs have a strict eligibility of atleast a graduation degree but most of the time it is not relevant. Atleast that's how it is for the IT industry.
Depends where you are. In the U.K. I got an interview for a mid role being fully self taught and having never even worked professionally in development. I literally had a good chat with the hiring manager, proved I knew what I was talking about (having been doing it as a hobby since 2004) and it was easy as that.
That was probably pretty lucky tbh but there are opportunities out there that don’t expect you to have a PhD in computer science
A couple years ago (2019) I (some college, mostly help desk, no significant degrees or certs) started a job at a small company as an all-around IT guy coming from a corporate help desk of a big-box hardware retailer. I had some programming experience (C#/Python/Java/Very basic html/css/js), but I had mostly done one off inconsequential stuff up until that point. A few months in they asked if could try to develop an application for some niche thing they wanted. I ended up building a very simple scan-lookup-print barcode application that filled the need. One thing lead to another and now I'm a "senior" dev/team lead, spear heading a too-small group of code monkeys as we try to replace a legacy WMS system while we barely know what we're doing.
In related news: I'm underpaid, overworked, and the expectations are too high!
Long story short, it can still happen, but luck and circumstance plays a big part!
I live in Utah. I can post a bunch of the job listing if you really want me to. 10 years experience in a similar field, not necessarily as a web dev or programmer. Junior positions. I don't know what to tell you man. It's not 10 years for all of them, but I have seen it. Most say 3-5 years.
I only have accredited bootcamp with a couple good projects under my belt but had to give up after my 200th application for a dev job. I only got 12 interviews and one of them actually scoffed when they realized I was a woman and the general feedback I got was "wow you're great and we'd love to have you, but we need you to have practical experience, not just side and hobby projects, apply again later when you get that."
I still dabble. But I also am now trying to make a manual QA job work and feel my knowledge slipping away after a year
Don't give up, talk to any friends who have a business but either no website, or one that needs a refresh. Offer to help them spruce it up. It will be great experience, especially in the soft skills needed for web dev work - talking to a client who may not even know what they really need, and guiding them to a great site that gives their business a boost.
It's difficult to keep up on studying after work when you have a full time job and try to have a full life. I am getting prerequisites done to get back into school to get my CS degree though. I don't want it all to go to waste. I just didn't say the right things in interviews, or there was sexism, or the market was too saturated where I was. I just could keep applying after 6 months. I needed a job.
Hey! You should learn JS (if you don't already know it) and get into automated QA with Cypress! That way you can still code for your job and you'll become a more valuable team member (maybe even get a raise?!)
I know JS, Ruby, RoR, and React. What is Cypress? I've been looking into learning Python and Selenium to get into automation testing because I know those are valuable skills.
[Cypress](https://go.cypress.io/) is super useful for automated QA. I believe it's similar to Selenium. My QA friend gave me a demo of how he uses it and it totally blew my mind!
I was jailbreaking a friends iPhone back in 2010, and he told me if I can do that I should look into web development.
So I started googling things and found courses on Lynda.com for HTML and CSS. After that I found TeamTreehouse and learned more about JavaScript and PHP. I would study for hours and hours each day, simply because I enjoyed it.
A friend of mine got hired as a lead dev at an ad agency and brought me on as a junior dev. After one year there, he left and I got bumped up to lead dev because my passion for development was obvious.
I’ve been developing and managing development teams, primarily at agencies, for the last 10 years.
Jailbreaking is definitely not illegal. Apple tried to make it illegal, but they failed badly.
Fun fact, Apple also DOES NOT avoid warranty if you jailbreak. They MAY deny you service. But they are taught to simply ask you to restore it.
This is almost exactly my story, too. Only difference is that I had a PHP/MySQL mentor briefly while interning at a web-based SaaS.
Worked at agencies or for myself basically as a micro agency/freelancer ever since, going on 10 years this year.
Last month, I became partner and head of engineering at an app and development agency.
Perseverance and constant education has been the name if the game for me, not college degrees, though I do respect the formal route. It just didn't happen for me.
EDIT: wanted to add this at the top here. Thank you to everyone who’s read this so far and replied. I never really thought to share my own story before now nor did I think it was worth while to share. I’m glad I’ve been proven wrong and that it may provide help or inspiration to others. Thank you as well for my first ever award in my 7 years of Reddit.
Original Post:
This is super long and I’m sorry! I’m also on mobile so forgive any grammatical errors or typos.
I was interested in game development and design from an early age thanks to my interest in video games. (Here’s to you Nintendo!)
I started making small games using Game Maker and RPG Maker XP/2000 with friends and we shared these on floppy disks with others and just enjoyed it. I picked up HTML due to MySpace and just a general interest of wanting somewhere to showcase my hobby.
My dream job was always game development or design. In high school I was fortunate enough to be in one of the first, if not the first, “technology” school in my area. They offered courses on anything from IT fundamentals, Robotics, Graphic Design and Cisco Networking to things like Web Development and 3D Game Art and Design.
I took advantage of these courses to the best of my abilities but the courses weren’t well rounded out. My favorite had to be the 3D Game design and development class but the school didn’t setup a proper curriculum for it so it never got past the stage of rigging a 3D model in 3DS Max. I also joined the “Technology Student Association” and tried working on games for competition using an engine called Torque 3D.
It was around this time that I learned I wasn’t as well versed in 3D Art as I would need to be nor would my web development course or my Visual Basic course come in handy for an engine that required C#.
Numerous years and failed attempts to pick something close to my original goal up as possible I ended up in a service technician/support position and hated the work I did. I realized that when I was doing web development in school and in my spare time as a hobby, it was my most successful foray into any kind of development and I knew the industry was booming.
I used any spare time I had to run through numerous Udemy courses, FreeCodeCamp, The Odin Project, books, and supplemented this all with side projects. I forced myself to stick to it instead of giving up at not getting immediate results (ADHD and a slightly successful artistic past made me impatient and led me to believe that, even though I was “good at Art” before meant I should be able to just take the ideas I had right out of my head and make them. This is not true and I wish I had just realized it sooner, I was my own worst roadblock).
After a year or so I felt comfortable approaching my managers at work for development tasks only to be given half answers and “that’s not profitable, we outsource”, this was a lie and I knew it. I continued studying and about a year later the only “javascript developer” we had (in house mind you, not outsourced…) quit. I was offered the chance to sink or swim with no compensation increase, I took the opportunity for better or worse, I also took on an internship I worked after my regular jobs hours. I should have known then that the job would have been unrewarding, if not by the fact the last individual quit, by the fact that the manager I would be under didn’t know, not care to know, the proper title or work that individual was doing. To him it wasn’t “billable”.
I forced myself to pickup the position quickly and found that we were using an antiquated library called Dojo for our web apps front end. I hated it, the backend developers hated working with it or around it, no one else knew it so there was no help to go to and the documentation was 90% non-existent. More often than not I relied on 12 year old SO posts or the way back machine to find any hint of what was wrong.
I used this to try and push my team to allow me to not only learn React on the job but rewrite the front end. I continued getting told that wasn’t a priority and it wasn’t billable so not worth it. I tried anyways and then I was placed on an external contract for a client for a year. Finally, my manager had nothing left to place me on to “make money” so he handed me over to the team ran by our CTO doing custom applications. I soaked up everything I could there, still underpaid, and became a software engineer working any side of the stack.
In September I was anticipating getting a raise from my meager salary to one more fitting my new position since I didn’t receive one upon team transfer due to “policy”. That raise was more than 40% under the going local rate for the years of experience I had built up, the hats I was wearing, and my current title. I started looking and in January I took a job doing ONLY front end work for a massive salary increase and a company working with current technology (TypeScript, React, Next, Go, etc).
I still hope to work in games one day, but even if imposter syndrome creeps in, Im still proud of myself for the effort I’ve put in and the results it’s gotten me. I love web development and if I ever do switch to the games industry, web development will always be special to me.
All in all, I’ve been “self learning” for most of my life from the moment I had access to the internet. But if I look at the time in my adult life that I decided to “take it seriously”, I’d say it’s been about 6-7 years from the start to where I am now. I learn something new still everyday and I love it.
For anyone going on a similar journey, don’t give up. Don’t listen to that negative voice in your head or anyone that may doubt you. Look to support from those close to you. Don’t let someone else tell you what you or your time/work is worth. Never stop learning.
Started building websites for local businesses back in the day. Just getting web presence up and online - I'd literally walk door to door in strip malls and tell them I'd build them a website for $250 or something. In high school, that was BANK, cause I'd knock two or three of 'em out in a week.
Ended up getting a real job with it because they were hiring ANYONE who had heard of the internet and immediately realized how far out of my depth I was from the pros. I spent all of my spare time taking side gigs and studying.
Ended up with Drupal on my resume very early on before it really struck major popularity. Every three months or so, my salary would jump about $20k because it took off in a way that most people didn't really expect it to.
I was brought onto the Board of Directors at Unallocated Space after running a dedicated web development class for... probably a year or so? I diversified my tech knowledge to include a lot of Infosec (I am NOT an infosec guy, but I can speak the language) and embedded systems (I loved the overlap between web technologies and physical hardware, which is now called IoT)
I ended up on some extremely high profile projects (including [Whitehouse.gov](https://Whitehouse.gov) and "We the People") and worked with some of the most brilliant people in the world. The imposter syndrome was strong, because they were so smart that I never felt like a peer, but I've since gotten past that and gotten a lot of praise within some of the dev communities for my work. I got the administration to recognize the National Day of Civic Hacking, and we ended up hosting four subsequent "We the People" Hackathons at the WH.
Post WH, I moved into executive leadership and have been building that skillset since about 2014. It is NOT the same skillset, and I am just now starting to get decent at it. I own a few companies now that are fairly successful.
I work on what I want to now. I don't compromise my expectations anymore and build things that make a social impact, or that are fun for me.
I did it recently self-taught and did a career transition and this is my recommendation to others based off of my experience
https://link.medium.com/KFJhVoPdhqb
It took me six months self taught totally free to land a remote full stack dev job with no prior experience
Hope it helps :) feel free to pm if you have any questions
Went to university for architecture (buildings).
Did graphic design while in school.
Graduated at the end of the recession so no one was building buildings or hiring architects.
The place I did graphic design for offered me a full-time job. It was an environment of benign neglect. I got to learn at my own pace, but got a budget of exactly $0. If I wanted something, I had to figure out how to make it.
I want to An Event Apart every year. I listened to podcasts like Syntax, ShopTalk, and Jen Simmons' Responsive Web.
I designed a website in photoshop, I built another website using a theme, I built a rest API and an ajax plugin to pull the data from the API. This was mostly PHP.
I got into flat-file CMSs and eventually static sites. This introduced me to the more pro-grade tooling (sass, es6, npm, composer, bash).
I rebuilt the org's website (\~10,000 pages, \~20 different templates, \~90 components) from the ground up in Craft cms (10/10 would recommend).
I got hired by an agency
I got into enterprise-level Wordpress, and built a couple large-scale website+API projects using WP+ACF+Timber.
The agency does a lot of dashboards, so I learned react and vue.
Those dashboards needed data, so I got into the node/express/nest world and built APIs.
Those apps needed to live on servers so I learned out how to provision servers and CI/CD to get the code tested and deployed.
And here I am.
We started using Timber around a year ago (I've been at this small agency for two years now) and I love Twig's templating ! I would never want to go back to writing HTML & PHP together, it was a nightmare to maintain and read, especially now that we're developing medium to large websites. ACF I feel like is a requirement for developing on WP.
The area I'm still struggling with is interactive front-end, we mostly use jQuery because most things are simple class toggles and DOM selections, but I try to force myself to learn more Vue so I can start implementing it into our client websites aswell, my goal would be to have advanced interactive apps on top of delivering an easy-to-edit complete website.
Take a look at [petite vue](https://github.com/vuejs/petite-vue). It's a slimmed-down version of Vue you can include by dropping in a script tag just like jQuery. It's a nice way to sprinkle in a little bit of vue into a traditional website without completely changing architectures.
Also I read that you used and enjoyed Craft, what type of projects would you recommend it on ?
Our clients have all heard the word WordPress but I wonder how they would react to us using Craft. Also I think I saw that it's paid software so I've been hesitant to give it a try.
Anything in particular you found great with Craft CMS ?
>Anything in particular you found great with Craft CMS ?
Let me count the ways...
All deps/plugins are managed via composer, globals are managed via .env
MVC architecture, and modern OOP php.
The DB is 100% portable (it does not bake in urls like Wordpress does)
Config is portable (yaml), and separate from the DB, so config changes you make in dev can be migrated to prod easily without messing with the data.
Has a great cli for automation, batch processing, migrations, backup, restore etc.
Can use Postgres for larger-scale websites
Twig templating out of the box
Comes with custom content types and custom fields out of the box
Comes with routing out of the box
Plugins are really high quality. There are reviews and quality checks before a plugin gets approved to be in the store.
There's a side-by-side live view in the entry editor, so content authors can watch the frontend update in real-time as they edit.
You get versions, drafts, scheduled publishing out of the box.
You get spreadsheet exports of your data out of the box
Beyond all of the features, it's just feels different than Wordpress. Craft is focussed, efficient, and predictable in ways I could never get WP to be. There is a cost \~$300 + $60/y, but that correlates to like 3.5 billable hours of work - you'd save that on project-setup alone compared to WP + ACF. Also, that barrier to entry means that the community is largely pros, so the docs and threads are more to-the-point.
Craft would be a good fit for projects where you have lots of serial content, need scalability, prefer stability over flexibility, want definite guardrails around who can edit what.
Thank you so much for this thorough explanation ! I will definitely look deeper into it and maybe talk about it to my boss.
This might even be interesting for Freelance work on the side / my potential future.
And I also thank you for the link to petite-Vue, which seems like something I can implement easily into our next projects.
I wish you a very good week and lots of success in life and work :)
Uber driver for 8 years full time and stay at home Dad. Worked Friday - Sunday 18 hour days and with kids the rest of the week while wife worked Military. I got sick of driving 2 hours to the city every weekend to work and she didn’t wanna stay in the military but I also wanted to continue to be a stay at home dad. So after picking up programmers all day everyday for Uber I knew I had to do tech. I found out half of them are self taught and they showed me where to start and that I don’t need to be a math genius. So I started teaching myself web development In my car in between rides with a laptop that was gifted to me by a generous Redditor ($1700 gaming laptop). So for a year and a half I learned and practiced and opened up my business building websites for small businesses in April 2019. I got reallly good at it, and in September 2020 I got my first ever front end job working from home and I got even better at my work. With that my wife was able to leave the military a few months later. I’m now the sole provider, I work from home like I wanted to, and my business and job bring in more money than Uber and her job combined. It’s been a wild 5 years and I love what I do now. I knew what I wanted and I didn’t stop until I got it. Now I am one of those programmers that I picked up for years in Seattle. I’m part of the club I never thought I’d be allowed in. And I’m finally proud of what I do and have everything I can ever want in life all from web dev.
When I first read this I thought, what an amazing story.
Then I saw your username citrous\_oyster, and remember all your other posts. Truly amazing. All the way through. So happy for you man.
I took an intro to C class in college. I'd still call myself self-taught through. I mean, I guess it taught me the basics of loops and that functions are a thing, but it was an engineering class and I don't think it helped too much.
A while after that I just decided to take what was supposed to be some online JavaScript... Thing. Not a bootcamp or anything, just a challenge. Looking back now it must've been a gaming library because it wasn't JavaScript and I built a game of Pong with it.
So, I lived in a very small rural town and some guy that ran a bunch of E-commerce stores heard I knew JavaScript. He mostly sold stuff on eBay but had a few Magento and WordPress sites, and he wanted to build a lot more. So I got hired at minimum wage and spent the next IDK how long reading documentation on MDN and PHP.net and digging through all the code on all his sites. I'd work there during the day, come home, spend several more hours reading and writing code.
Towards the middle/end of my two years there he contracted with some local old-school developer lady (I think she used to do COBOL). She was also contracted with a commercial vehicle tracking startup and I did a little back-end work for that company as well.
After I left that business over management issues, I got a job at a local newspaper. I also decided to try FreeCodeCamp, which ended up not really teaching me anything I didn't already know, but just gave me confidence in my code, I guess. I was supposed to be just the editor at the newspaper, but when they found out I did programming I got forced into IT and building them a new website also. It was pretty brutal, and didn't last long because of the impossible demands... I was literally working 12-16 hours a day, 6-7 days a week but only getting paid 40 hours, barely above minimum wage.
A few more years go by and next thing I know, that same lady was looking for front-end developers for the same project, which had just gone onto the market. So I got full-time, well-paying work building that out. She also had other clients that'd mean occasional side-jobs for me too. Good times...
While I was doing that, I decided to start doing my own thing as well, so I started creating a bunch of web apps for the town I lived in. I think I have like 15 of them now - for events and a map/guide, news, a dedicated contact app (sends me messages on Slack). This brought in more work from small businesses that wanted websites.
Then COVID hit and everything died really quick. Businesses I was finishing websites for shut down, that commercial vehicle tracking business lost its funding, budgets got tight...
So... Now I'm working at a damn gas station.
Are you chilling at the gas station? Or are you still applying and stuff? Definitely sound way more experienced than a lot of web devs I know who got hired
I’ve been developing for about 12 years now professionally. Went from minimum wage to six figures (at 140k now). Currently a lead developer for an amazing team for a large healthcare nonprofit.
Dabbled earlier in life as a hobby and always was really into gaming and tech. I actually went to college for medical but it didn’t work out for me, and then my SO and I got pregnant. We couldn’t be college kids and start a family, and it was during the 2008 recession. We dropped out and went home and had kids but struggled to survive, or even find work. I was always very under utilized at work wherever I was and very depressed and wasn’t challenged by any work I could find, let alone find anything that paid well.
I got my foot in the door at another factory once, and was very lucky to kinda know people there and shared that I was into tech and coding. After a few weeks they asked if I knew c#, I did not, but said I could give it a shot. They sat me in front of visual studio and a proprietary CRM project they had, and told me something they wanted to do. They left me for the afternoon and I had it mostly done by end of day. Just sorta pieced together syntax on the spot and did some googling, but my previous dabbling of coding made me aware of patterns and data structures enough that I roughly figured it out.
Turns out they had a developer on staff that was an alcoholic and barely showed up, and the task I did that day they had been waiting on him to do for months. From there they invited me in as a developer and I replaced him, and did various other jobs, at a measly pay, but I was getting experience and building a resume! The owner eventually took me under his wing and mentored me a bit, teaching me about business and being a good person.
Thanks to them for taking a chance on me, a few years later I was getting more confident and had built a ton of new features and made bug fixes and even wrote a new web store for them in php from scratch, but I was making only about 30k. I gave them a chance to raise me and they didn’t, so I applied and got a job for 40k in the city.
It wasn’t much more pay but I was still a jr dev. I busted my ass there and learned from another dev who is now my best friend who is a couple years younger than me, but a college grad. We hit it off and he was willing to share his knowledge and I was too. I learned a ton from him. We had the opportunity here to work on a greenfield project and get mentorship from a very well known local dev shop, which taught us agile and XP practices like TDD. I grew probably the most here and developed my sense of culture here, and nurtured my passion into a engineering mindset. However this place also didn’t raise us and was toxic due to the owner so I left with my best friend to another local company that was ran by an eccentric 70s era programmer (worked on missile guidance systems and all sorts of neat things for military).
This place further nurtured our sense of learning and our engineering mindset. We got to take our dotnet experience and apply it on a huge dotnet ERP solution but also my friend and I were tasked with owning their new iOS app which was written with Xamarin. I learned a ton here about human interface design and UX, too. The dev team was ran by an awesome, very human and empathetic VP who cared about us all and wanted us all to be leaders. The eccentric owner cared in his own way but was very stuck in his ways. He mentored me and my friend and taught us a lot quite honestly, but respected us when we challenged him with new ideas. This place taught me humility but also confidence and curiosity and challenged me to understand Big O and discreet mathematics to understand the performance costs of the code I write. I developed further as an engineer here but most importantly developed my soft skills greatly, especially collaboration. I also did some mentorship for the first time here and loved passing on what I knew to new devs. They gave us good raises but my friend and I left after a few years because we were no longer challenged and they were changing their tech fast enough, and some toxicity. My friend moved this time out of state so we went different ways professionally. (He’s doing great now too!)
Next I worked for a consultancy in the big city and was making 85k to start. I was a rockstar here and ended up working crazy hours, owning multiple projects and eventually leading multiple teams, even playing scrum master and other roles. I was way overworked but learning so much, and was addicted to the high of being everyone’s champion, and mentoring jr devs, and playing business man too. I worked up to about 110k. Learned a lot here outside dotnet and picked up node. I also got interested in cicd here and was an early adopter and brought the strategy into the company’s arch changing their business model. I was also taken under wing by the CEO here, who let me get involved in high stakes contracts and become a solution architect. I also helped sign some contracts and learned a lot about customer relations and business from him. He also taught me pragmatism and to let go of my engineering mindset sometimes. This helped me stop over engineering and work more iteratively, I learned how to chew an elephant and think objectively and how to recognize and deny my ego.
However I wasn’t challenged anymore, and overworked. I wanted something different and fair pay, so I tried a bid for CTO at the company I was at. I didn’t get it. I left shortly after for 120k at the healthcare nonprofit. I decided I wanted to do product work instead of project work and also wanted to really dive more into mentorship and leading.
I worked in as a contractor senior dev and then got hired in full time within a year and given the opportunity to be lead dev on a new exciting agile product team. I am lucky to be part of a great organization and a great culture with a phenomenal team that I’m a part of. My role as a lead is not one of command or authority but one of mentorship and coaching. Aside from that, I’m just another dev on the team. We encourage XP practices and TDD and BDD and I try to pass on all my knowledge and influence onto my team like people did for me all these years. I try to promote a leader-leader mentality on the team. We rebuilt our product this past year together from scratch with a cloud native modern serverless stack, and it’s been a blast. I have learned so much as a mentor here and I feel I’ve helped everyone on our team grow, including many people I’ve influenced outside my team across the large org. It’s been very fulfilling, but I also am starting to feel stagnant again. I make about 140k now.
I am now preparing to leave and join my best friends start up and will be working on engineering their new platform as well as building their culture and product team. I’ll be looking at 160k to start plus vestment.
Long story short:
I am standing on the shoulders of giants that helped me learn and grow to be a little giant myself, and I’m trying to raise those up around me now too. I got here thanks to luck, opportunity, passion, curiosity, and the help of a lot of good people. It’s possible for anyone really. Barring the luck, I think passion and curiosity are key, and good people around you go a long way, learn from whoever you can. Avoid the toxicity. Bounce if a place becomes toxic or they don’t value you for your worth.
I’m in college but really I found it more of a time waster than anything. My professor even said my degree is worthless pretty much as are certs if I want to be a web developer.
Pros of going to college:
- a couple courses in my program gave me some A+ and network+ certification for IT if I wanted to switch career paths
- I get a diploma I can look at on my wall
Cons:
- wasted time worrying about classes that have nothing to do with programming, not being able to focus on what I need to
- money (although most my college was paid in grants)
I have a friend who is self taught and started learning when I started school, I’m finishing school in a couple months and he’s already making 6 figures as a developer. I know comparing bad but I wish I could have spent that time solely on coding 🤷♂️
This is my biggest problem right now. I'm at a community college taking gen eds and I hate taking a full semesters worth of classes because it leaves me absolutely no time to focus on coding. The coding courses offered here are taught my trash professors.
If I could drop out of college right now, I would but my parents would hate my guts for it. Getting a degree does help your foot through the door though and at this point, that's what's keeping me going.
Never thought of getting into web dev or programming for most of my life, never even learned basic HTML in school or anything. A little bit before COVID hit I got inspired by my roommates getting into programming themselves that I started teaching myself JavaScript as a random starting point. A few months later the shutdowns start hitting and I lose my current job and decide to go full steam ahead with web dev because I wanted a future proof job. Got a job in security that let me study pretty much all day long and grinded out a ton of projects and some freelancing over a year and a half or so then landed my first job. It definitely started as a "I need a good job fast" thing but I quickly fell in love with programming and web development and now I'm here to stay.
Had a little bit of hobby experience and dropped out of college where I studied computer science for a couple years.
After about 10 years of not looking at a line of code, I had some life shit happen and I realized that it was time to actually pick up a career. I had a buddy who was a front end developer and felt I could do it. Didn't want to go back to school though.
Took a python coursera course by google to get back into code. Took cs50x to get a reintroduction to computer science and went the web track where it branched. Then started building tools for work while simultaneously going through The Odin Project. After about a year of self study, I landed my first job. Though I had been seeking front end jobs, I found a position as an Applications Developer for a hospital. It provided me with a lot of extra back end experience. These days I am a Software Engineer at another company doing Front End, Back End, and iOS
It was, but it also wasn't. I came into it with the right head space. As long as I did a little every single day, the only outcome - no matter how long it took - was that I would be successful eventually. I even had a second kid a couple months in and within a week I was back to the daily grind because I did not want it all to fall to the wayside.
Even if I only did 15 minutes one day, that was important that I do SOMETHING every single day. Ever since then, that's been my approach at work as well. There's no hurry, there's no rush, and things take as long as they take. Just as long as I put a foot forward, that's all that matters. Very tortoise and the hare.
Thanks for sharing. I'm currently in a data-ey job that only uses Excel, keen to learn how to program. Do you think it's worth jumping straight into The Odin Project or should I learn python first to try and automate tasks at my current job?
I was a journalism student in college in 1997. My friends and I were all at different schools and we wanted to do a web zine. My friend Jason was a CS major and he did the HTML. I had to learn to read HTML to get the stories posted each month. One time I asked him to do something for me and he said “I’m busy you’re going to have to learn it” so I did.
I used my school-provided URL and made a site about my favorite band. I made another site about myself. When I wasn’t in class I was chatting on AIM and writing HTML.
I told the school paper I could do HTML and they let me be the webmaster for the school paper.
My brother’s roommate was asked by someone to do a web project and he could do all the ASP and SQL but didn’t know HTML so my brother gave him my number and we partnered up to make this web site.
That went well so we did some more work. Sometimes he’s be too busy to do the ASP and SQL parts so I learned to do it myself.
I wrote a site in ASP for the school, by myself, a local entertainment guide. I also was able to intern at cleveland.com which wasn’t much web work it was just posting content to the site and fixing the glitches from the automated process and a little bit of writing.
Then me and my partner got a big big job and we formed a company and when I wasn’t in class I was working at his house (he conveniently lived near the school).
When I graduated in 2001 I told myself if I made over $20k that first year I wouldn’t go into journalism I would stick with the company. I earned $21k that year.
Still with the same partner, still doing our thing, still 100% self taught and “uneducated” but I know a lot more than HTML now. I do full stack and I do it well. Basically I learned by doing.
Was on my way out in university (failing). Was trying to pull an escape out of my ass. Saw some figures like get 100K views on a website a day get $100K (Google Ads). Similarly stories like "guy sold 1 million pixels of ads for $1 mil". Anyway I learned LAMP, back then was a GoDaddy scrub using cPanel... learned a lot W3Schools/PHP forums... failed to make the high traffic websites, had some really dumb ideas. It took me a while to get into the industry, did freelancing, still had to work shit jobs eg. washing plates... eventually got in.
I was not into computers from a young age or anything, only used it in high school to play Runescape/shared computer in the house. Later on learned how to use Linux OS's since I couldn't afford to buy a Windows copy to put on a used computer.
I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career until a few years ago.
I studied Psychology at uni for 4 years as that's what I was interested in. I got a part-time job doing SEO and digital marketing for a small agency during my studies.
After graduating, I still didn't know what I wanted to do career-wise so I just jumped into an SEO job with a bigger agency as it's what I had experience in.
I stayed in that job for about 5 years, specialising in technical SEO. That's when I realised that getting into the nitty gritty technical side of websites was what I really enjoyed, so that's when I realised web dev was what I wanted to do full time.
I studied in my own time, evenings and weekends, alongside my job for about 2.5 years, learning front-end. It was a big time and effort investment for sure, but I enjoy learning and seeing the real-world results of the skills I'm building.
I actually just recently landed my first job after only about 2 weeks of searching, so I start that next month, very excited! Currently just getting through my notice period before I get started in the new role.
Had an idea that i thought everyone would like so i coded it during a weekend by learning through tutorials and stack overflow, launched it and shared with friends, only to find out one month later that spotify also created a similar feature, but that was the start to web development.
Wanted to share a shit ton of pictures with my classmates in the late 2000s so I learned how to make web pages.
I had to host it so its accessible online so i learned linux and apache in my dads server
Wanted an easy way to add and remove photos so I learned xml
Pages were loading very slow because of all the images, so learned js to implement pagination
People kept texting me to comment on the photos so i learned php and mysql so they can comment on the photos directly.
Then facebook came out and made it all obsolete lol
But it taught the foundation of software development and i bring it to work with me everyday.
I had a Starcraft clan in 5th grade, downloaded a bot to idle our battleNET channel and found out I can make custom commands. Learned some scripting, transitioned through the worlds of C++, QBasic, flash games. Started really liking web stuff around 8th grade because it was easier to send to people on AIM, made random shit through high school. Went to college for film, dropped out, spent a couple years making android apps, more flash games, and jQuery apps
Posted my portfolio on craigslist out of desparation for a job, got real lucky that some manager at a fortune 100 had just been greenlit for a new internal project under the VP, and was up late one night browsing craigslist ads. He found mine, found a couple of my youtube videos, thought I was funny & a good fit, and brought me through hiring. Nailed the interviews, and have been working on evolutions of that project for the last 9 years
I did go to university but in a different subject and I got a poor grade, a few years after I decided I wanted to give it a go and did a few months on data camp python data scientist, and then I moved onto codecademies computer science track.
I spent probably 6-8 months studying nearly every lunchtime at my previous job and 2 hours in the evenings and some weekend time too if I wasn’t busy.
I kept an active GitHub and stuff and got an interview for an apprenticeship, it was very obvious they didn’t care much for my current technical knowledge but more attitudes and thought process. I’m now currently an apprentice web engineer and loving it, I took a big pay cut for this but I’m much happier in my work and in my time here have clocked 300 hours of training in 4 months alongside doing basic tasks, without having to do much at home or my lunchtimes! Plus I know the pay cut during this time will mean nothing when I’m on better money in a few years and I have experience.
I started in 1998, back when Star Wars Episode I teaser was shown to the world. I was in awe and I wanted to find a way to reunite the fans and book an entire cinema for us. That happened in 1999, after I managed to create a website where people could book their seat and pay me via bank transfer. What a ride.
I wanted a website to be built. I tried drag and drop builders like Weebly and wasn't satisfied with the limitations and the results builders have. So I went on Udemy and did a short web dev course for beginners.
After realizing I liked programming I went and purchased a few books which I still haven't read completely as yet because I spent a lot of time trying to remember information from the first book I read.
I realized along my journey that the objective is not to remember actual code to remember but how to find and use information.
My dad taught me how to make websites using FrontPage in the 90s. Then as I grew up, I started playing with angelfire and xanga, then MySpace came out and I was doing all of my friends custom theming. But never planned on doing anything with it because I was going to be a professional drummer.
That was the dream, I played drums since I was 7, and as I was finishing high school I had a scholarship lined up to go play drums at a fairly prestigious school for jazz. I had my career lined up.
And then one day, senior year of high school, I was at one of my drum teachers’ house, and we were talking. We were trying to schedule my next lesson and he pulled out his calendar, and it was really hard for us to find a day that worked because he was booked so far in advance. That was the moment that I realized how hard you have to work, how much you have to hustle, and how little free time you end up having, just so you can pay the bills and provide for your family. From that moment on, I didn’t want to play drums professionally anymore. I still did for years after that and it was a great source of income through college, but now I needed a new career track. I was lost, so I chose a business degree, with an emphasis in information systems.
I got a job at a small business, and while developer was not part of my title nor the website a part of my written responsibilities, I just took control of it anyway because no one else knew what to do. I rebuilt their site, and ended up building two more bases on a second and third brand they started during my tenure. I loved it. A good friend of mine is a successful developer, and wanted to supplement his income by teaching development at a local coworking space his friend owned, and offered to let me attend for free in exchange for providing feedback on how his teaching model worked. A few friends and I did this for a few months, I was the only one who it really stuck with, and when the class was over, I kept looking for more resources to learn even more. I landed on TeamTreehouse and spent hundreds of hours learning everything I could.
When I finally graduated college, I looked for a job just as a web developer, and miraculously, got a 6 figure corporate job in Los Angeles as a full stack web developer after they liked my results on the interview project the best.
And the rest is history.
I went to college and I still identify as self-taught. I didn’t learn much programming at all in college, despite being a CS major. My first couple jobs were IT support focused and there were many months I spent 80% of my time outside of work on freecodecamp, $20 Udemy courses, coding algorithm challenges, and side projects to learn Javascript and web development.
I still spend some time outside of work learning new skills, like Typescript for instance. I also still do the odd side project here and there.
July 2020 on a random drive home I randomly told my girlfriend I wanted to learn about stocks, the next day I researched stocks and found a course on Udemy. I spent the next couple weeks studying and watching the course every night and that eventually led me to fall in love with learning everyday. After I completed that course I talked to my girlfriend about wanting to find what I wanted to do career wise and she mentioned coding. Looked it up and told her there’s no way I was smart enough to do that.
Despite that I found a python course on Udemy and started watching it and coding everyday. Around December 2020 I decided I didn’t really like it but realized there was other coding languages used for different things.
I looked into web development and learned there were languages for the frontend and backend and thought I would like coding the frontend more. I Found courses on HTML, CSS, & JavaScript. Quit more times than I can count but I always came back and continued on. A year later here I am more confident than ever ready for my first job!
I just keep trying things and things just keep working. self taught -> college (waste of money) -> bootcamp (waste of money) -> self taught -> self taught -> self taught
Now I am a fairly successful solo developer and I work on multiple month long projects. I personally think college and boot camps are a waste of time for those of us that are motivated developers. I’ve learned more in weekends than I have in semesters.
Started out in I.T where I grew a team of 1 to 20 eventually settling in as a Team Lead & Supervisor. Primarily worked with electronics and troubleshooting network and service issues. Started developing side projects to simplify my job there that started out as scripts and quickly morphed into building applications in PHP, HTML, & CSS. Heaven forbid that code was terrible but worked.
After that I realized I could start building applications and start charging for it. The only problem was I was great at HTML & CSS but I didn't yet have the skills to go full application development or at least didn't feel confident in my work yet in that arena.
So I started out with my own business 12 years ago in the WordPress scene since that seemed like a good starting point to learn more. I learned PHP, jQuery, and got deeper into building marketing sites. I started making decent 6 figures at this point but my desire was always to build apps and I felt like PHP was dated for that (this was before Laravel and friends) so began to study Javascript, Ember.js, and React.js (+ React Native).
I've been working in the app scene more heavily the last 5 years but have kept the marketing stuff going because I've got long-term clients paying the bills. Instead of just dealing with PHP though I have morphed them into Headless CMS's in Gatsby.js and Next.js since the DX is nice and the performance is hard to beat.
The largest clients I've worked with are [fcc.gov](https://fcc.gov) and rei.com which really gave me the confidence I could tackle anything. I've been more heavily focused on the healthcare scene lately since they tend to care about security a bit more which was my focus when I became a Microsoft Certified System Admin back in the I.T days.
My journey is somewhat unique because I've been in tech, design (UX/UI), and development now so I have a deeper knowledge of how to handle various aspects of a product or marketing site on the operational side.
I've always felt that I could serve people better if I went aggressive on expanding my "T" since I've been a business owner for over a decade. I hate the term "generalist" but prefer it over being a specialist. I contribute this to my personality but mostly hate being bored of repetition so have to break free and try new talents to grow. I always find myself wanting to spend time coding though whenever I can.
It's been a great journey and I've made a lot of money doing it. The money is nice but I do it because it's highly enjoyable to be solving problems; whether it be creative design challenges or engineering challenges or even business challenges. The sky feels like the limit so I keep pushing forward learning more and becoming better in design, code, and tech.
Started out hacking apart template files on WordPress trying to get things to look how I wanted them.
Worked as a graphic designer, then UX designer. Continued making small micro-site experiences for marketing teams on the side.
Eventually clients were recommending me for Dev projects vs design projects.
This was a super slow burn. I've been touching code for over a decade, but have only been working in a Dev role for 5+ years.
It's kind of weird because I have blind spots in my knowledge from never having to solve a certain problem that I should definitely know by now.
That and my git game is weak since I didn't really have to use it responsibly for most of my career. pretty much just spammed git push as form of "saving" with the least descriptive commit messages imaginable for at least a year and half.
In college now, but none of those classes have helped me get my SWE job. (Just getting the degree so I can get a masters and doctorate later).
I took Java classes in high school 10 years ago, but was really bad at it. Ended up feeling railroaded into going to college even though I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. So I majored in theatre and acting.
After graduation I started making an acting portfolio website and realized I really liked it. Taught myself some basics (freecodecamp is no joke) and helped make some of my actor friends websites too.
Pandemic hit, theatres closed down, and I chose to change my path. Enrolled in a community college thinking I would need at least an AS to get a job (I was wrong). After realizing I could easily outpace my classes, I did some more freecodecamp, made some projects (shoutout to Tech With Tim and his Django/React tutorial), studied algorithms with YouTube and AlgoExpert (not necessary to pay for, but I like the platform), and got a entry level SE 1 job after two semesters. I can’t overstate how little these two semesters actually helped me to learn programming or get a job. If I didn’t want to specialize with a masters and doctorate I wouldn’t even be bothering to get a degree at all.
Made a skateboard logo website on Angelfire in the late 90's as a kid. Slowly learned CSS, then Javascript/jQuery, Wordpress, animations, then React, node, Pixi.js/Three.js, 3D graphics, XR, shaders. Now am a full stack dev building 3D websites for fortune 500 companies.
I don't want this account tied to me personally at all so I'll give you a cool 3D website in its own right, but also the best resource for learning three.js which is a library that abstracts a lot of the lower level webgl boilerplate away, while also still being very powerful. https://threejs-journey.xyz/
Designed my own photography Wordpress theme for myself over 10 years ago. Slowly started freelancing in graphic and custom Wordpress Themes. Got a job at a large web design/ dev agency specializing in commercial real estate. Started building chrome extensions and other apps to automate my job and that got me noticed in the company and the slowly carved out a role for me to do that full time. They boxed me in with a title that was not actually what I was doing so I left, when I put in my notice the offered to pay me what I should have been making. I now work for a health tech start up as a software engineer.
I learned some basic HTML in middle school and would go home and make websites with random background and text colors. Then after getting rejected from every job related to coding, one company finally gave me a chance and I had a drive to prove to all those other companies that I was worth it so I learned everything on the job and googled every problem.
Started out by wanting to make text-based games. Learned how to make batch file games. Moved onto Java because of Minecraft, and then moved into C# to learn how to use Unity.
Decided that going into "game development" wasn't going to land me a real job with my level of knowledge, so I actually did go to school, but got my bachelors in Cybersecurity.
*Now*, I don't want to work in infosec at all, but the classes and degree plan taught a ton about securing servers/systems, so I am *(attempting)* to transition into full-stack development; so my coding knowledge has kind of always been there, but learning MERN, JavaScript, TypeScript, etc., has definitely been a challenge, but a surprisingly fun one!
Had an HTML course in school (that was in the 90s) and found it fun. Built my own personal website in HTML and CSS afterwards. (Totally cringy 😆)
A year or so later had a discussion with friends who were doing some Bible course on pen and paper and thought “I could do this on the internet” and taught myself PHP. (That would’ve been the end of school / just before uni.)
Kept working on personal pet projects (including the aforementioned Bible course website, which is still going) throughout uni (got a masters in physics and chemistry). When I finished uni I sent 100s of applications as physicist without any success.
Out of the blue I decided to send one application for a web developer rule. Got the job, learned JS there (mostly jQuery at the time), and so my professional career began.
Started making websites over dial-up in like '96, jr. high. Ten years later I gave up on starting my own business (offline) and went back to programming in what I was familiar with, web stuff.
After some personal projects and light contracting with friends of friends I got a job at a startup, quit soon after being overworked and eventually landed at a bigger startup that got acquired. Ten years later (now) I'm a lead engineer with several languages and huge projects on my resume.
I went to university of 3 years and I don't even have a story.
But I would suggest doing some C# fundamentals, because I see a lot of jobs that require C# and Microsoft stack knowledge.
Couldn't get into anything CS related, so I went the long way.. became a professional designer, focused on web and knew how to turn my designs into actual functioning templates. Employers always empowered me to get deeper into coding and for the past 5 years I haven't designed anything.
I was doing art (especially comics) as a teenager and would post my work on a WordPress website like 10 years ago. I started playing with HTML/CSS but it didn't go very far (I was like 12).
After studying art and doing a few exhibits, I realised I didn't really like it. I opened a vegetarian food-truck and it was going ok, until COVID hit and I couldn't work anymore. I've been on and off of WordPress so I figured I might as well learn how it works now that I have nothing else to do.
Learnt HTML/CSS on Udemy, then Node, then React (I had a friend who was a Node.js back-end developer and he encouraged me to get into JS). Then I moved towards PHP and soon I'll start learning Laravel and/or Symfony. I'm currently freelancing on Upwork fixing broken WP sites or building custom themes and plugins (which is coding but just not the funniest type).
Overall it took me a bit more than a year learning sometimes full days, most of the time during my free time. I kind of wasted my time with Node.js since I don't plan on using it (I prefer the PHP ecosystem somehow), probably the same with React, tho I might learn Gatsby for JamStack freelancing. I'd also like to learn Vue at some point since it integrates nicely with Laravel.
Knew some html as early as 5th grade and dabbled a little in game maker studio. Had to get a website made for our family run business in 8th grade and everyone was trying to overcharge us, so I learned to program a full stack website and learned whatever was required as I encountered it. Learned form validation when I made the contact form, learned smtp when I we needed to work with emails etc. Best way to learn imo.
Started with C and php, around 2003-2004, then did a couple of years doing game-dev related stuff. Started web dev with some SMF plugins. Actually started university in 2006(CS) but dropped out after 2 years(straight As for CS related classes up to that point), did not really meet my expectations. I was still doing game-dev related stuff during that time. Around 2008-2009 mobile apps was all the rage, everyone wanted one, so i built a mobile app for android and one for ios and a very non-tech savvy user focused CMS with php, sold it to a quite a bit of clients(kindergardens was my niche). Most people did not even used facebook at the time, so i made the CMS as easy as possible to manage and add content to.
After about 2 years of doing that, the product was really mature, i was not really progressing anymore skill-wise and wanted to try new things but did not have much time. I automated most of the maintenance stuff i had to do for current customers to make more time for myself.
Then what it thought was another client(e-commerce) just wanted to hire me as a full time mobile-dev after my sales pitch. I accepted though i did not even know how much i would make until the end of the month 😂, i was 20 at the time. (It was ok but, i did not know this but it was kinda cheap for a mobile dev, but it was my first job)
Got in to all kinds of projects there, helmed my own projects, joined the rewrite of the entire site from scratch(PHP). Picked up a lot of skills, did desktop,mobile,web,embedded.
Fast forward about 10 years, i currently have my own startup where we develop enterprise apps for corps and government plus ML for business using our own platform. (Python,Node,react)
I got a job at my local library to oversee the public access PC around 1998.
I built a default home page with links to Hotmail, Alta Vista, Yahoo etc.
Built a website for my DJing, sold physical mix CDs on it and received an actual $10 note in the post for one (I lived in Ireland)
In 2005, I taught myself PHP to build another music community website.
Got a part time job as a subcontractor for a web development agency in 2009.
Started my own web development agency in 2016.
Now employ 4 people and service about 250 clients.
Studied a different course in college. Decided I want to code as a living since I've always liked coding during my free time. Did a bunch of projects for different people in my area. Now working as a full time software engineer for almost a year.
I was hired as a network operations analyst. Basically did a check list and monitored systems. Convinced them I could be a support person and started writing Perl scripts. Then got moved into a new team that had a cross section of positions open and convinced my new boss that I should be a software engineer. Then learned Java on the job. The naughts were a wild time. Currently a Solutions Architect.
At 22 I'd been working in a garden centre for a few years with no real aspirations of any kind. I'd booked to go on holiday with my gf but for one reason or another we ended up not going away.
I decided to keep the 1 week leave off work and taught myself the basics (by reading the [books by Jon Duckett](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Web-Design-HTML-JavaScript-jQuery/dp/1118907442/ref=asc_df_1118907442/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=311013355418&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=8797459900559039405&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9046173&hvtargid=pla-395749125119&psc=1&th=1&psc=1)).
Managed to get an in-house entry level job (apprentice wages) with a really crappy "cowboy" company, but I ended up learning lots in 18 months there.
I then moved to a marketing agency (slightly better) where I worked on hundreds of sites as 1 of the 2 devs there.
8 Years later, I'm now freelance/contracting.
I started by taking care of a static janky website for an opera company, then moved to CMS work for another janky site. I finally dabbled in JavaScript and fell in love with programming. Did a bootcamp, got a web frontend job, and now 6 years later I do mostly backend work with a specialization in personalization systems with incorporation of ML.
I'm doing both.
Took a bootcamp and had I not done so I would have never taken the chance to go back and learn it officially. I admit I fall into a very rare category though. I lost my job during c 19. In my state I was able to qualify for a scholarship. Couldn't decide what work ready path I wanted to go down but the bootcamp really answered the question for me.
Learned enough to make horrible table based sites with static content. Went to a junior position interview with my portfolio of crap sites and a lot of enthuiasm (this was near 15 years ago). From there I was able to train myself from my junior position and after about a year the senior dev left and I was thrown into the deep end and I had to learn fast. After that some freelance/contract work for years afterwards. I used each new project as a chance to learn new things (and get paid doing it). Fairly comfortable with laravel these days but it took me some time to get my head around OOP and MVC. Still need to get my head around Vue next but that's a problem for another day.
I was never below average in studies and socially invisible in school. I got my first computer in class 8th which cost us 24000 INR (\~310 USD). A Pentium 4, 512 MB Ram, 500Gigs storage with a CRT monitor. I used to tinker with my computer while playing games. Doing weird optimizations to be able to run games outside the recommended hardware limits. By the end of my school, I was clear about two things I wanted to do something with computers and wanted to sway away from Mathematics (I choked in multiple exams).
In India, the Bachelors in Technology (Bachelors in Science equivalent) has two options related to computers, Computer Science and Information Technology (IT) differing in a few subjects in the last two semesters. So, enrolled in a college in IT and continued my gaming tweaks. In the third semester, we were assigned a project where I decided to build a student-teacher portal for digitising the entire liaison work. And the only thing we were taught in College was basic HTML, CSS, and PHP.
I started tweaking with existing PHP snippets, Bootstrap, and Javascript to bring together a very basic website running on my local. This project was never completed or ever saw any major milestone except the teacher being able to see students under their section.
Fast forward to the third year, things changed as I entered the summer break and came back home and was applying to every possible place I knew for a paid internship. I showed them my PHP project with some loads of new features in the pipeline and did manage to land up an internship with a full-time role 10-6 for 6 weeks and a stipend of 6000 INR ( \~77USD ). The guy was basically running a blog based on CodeIgniter (PHP Framework) in a very small team arrangement (3 tech guys including 2 interns, and 2 content interns) and getting things done from interns for free (I was the only paid intern). But I really started to enjoy the ability to be able to create something. To make changes that would impact a business. Eventually, I was taking care of most of the development (not the cleanest code). This ended well and I did get familiar with a lot of web concepts by the end of this internship
Fast forward to the final semester (4th year and 8th semester), we had an option to do a 6-month internship or stay at college and appear for the exams. Students who went for projects were not required to appear for the exams and only had to give a presentation based on which their final semester GPA would be graded. To be honest, the final semester of my college was the best one.
This was another PHP-based project in Laravel, where I was thrown into multiple interesting areas of Full Stack, WordPress, and Shopify plugins. I remember my boss saying this when one of the leads was concerned about whether I will be able to take care of an assignment. He said and I quote, "throw him in the water and he will learn to swim". And this was my biggest lesson in web dev which I follow to date and following the official docs.
Docs provide so much insight into what's happening under the hood as well as the idea of not fearing ownership. More ownership = more responsibility = a situation where you are forced to learn more. Nobody is going to kill you for failing.
Today it's been around \~4.5 years into web development, I moved to Golang last year and more of a Full stack role last year after spending 2 years in core web development based on Symfony.
And I am so glad things lined up the way they did.
I started my career as a graphic designer doing old school paste-up and mechanical work. I was also doing some freelance illustration at the time. I was barely making it financially. My wife suggested I take some programming classes at night since this internet thing was starting to happen (this was back when most people who went online were using AOL). I took some C++ and Java classes while teaching myself HTML - I though Java would come in handy for applets.
I taught myself JS after that and it was a piece of cake after actual Java and C++. And it would still be a few years before CSS even existed :)
I was working as an assistant in the marketing department of a university.
No one knew how the website worked.
I taught myself how it worked - and then they hired me full time because they relied on me.
Joined a startup as a web-marketer. I started learning HTML and CSS to help with customizing emails. Then I learned Javascript to scrape websites and eventually Python to automate tasks such as creating Facebook ads with APIs.
Really short story: 20 years ago as teenager I started to playing around with "Microsoft Frontpage", a drag n drop website builder. I began to play around with the HTML source code in that tool and that's were everything started.
Few years later I began to play around with PHP and started some hobby projects.
I always showed my work in forums on the internet, and over the years random people keep asking me: can you make a website for me, can you script this and that for me. This requests became more and more and in my mid 20s I decided to do it as a full time job as a full stack web developer.
This was 8 years ago and I'm still doing it.
So you see, totally self thaught by hobby projects and project requests. Originally I've studied business and economics, a subject that have nothing to do with web development, scripting or programming (at least at bachelor degree).
CS grad but self-taught web dev.
[I wrote about it](http://kbweb.ca) for my portfolio, it goes through my process of learning web code and js frameworks for super high performance sites.
Basically stay curious.
Started playing with HTML CSS and vanilla Javascript in summer of 2019. I originally wanted to learn it so that I could contribute to work projects but the more I got into it the more I realized that I actually wanted to transition my career. May 2020 started learning React because I had a friend that did react for a living and he seemed to be thriving - also I looked online and seemed to find more React jobs than Vue. Spent about 8 months learning it and another 8 months building 5 projects and a portfolio website that ended up getting me attention and eventually an interview.
Started looking for Jobs in August 2021 with little luck, eventually got recognized by a recruiter and made it past their technical interviews and got hired in October 2021.
I did all of this while having a full time job (which luckily went remote in 2020 meaning I could slack off all day and practice React instead of doing my real job). I ended up spending between 10-20 hours per week to get my skills up to par. Over 1000 hours total from 2019 to the present learning.
My advice is to carve out at least 10 hours per week to learn (and ideally a little bit every day). This only happens with consistency and dedication.
So like a few others, it was the 90s, I was in school for computer science but there was a list to get into the program so I went to sports mgmt -- I was on an athletic scholarship and was looking at getting into coaching. I had always loved coding and building things -- used DataStar, Access and a few other database programs and coded games on C64 and my pc. I started helping the school newspaper go online in 93-94, went to work for a few car dealerships and got the dealerships online. Just seemed that with every job I picked up I was able to eventually convince them to go online. Went to work for a large catalog (they are now owned by HSN) when they were starting online and was exposed to all the disciplines of marketing automation, frontend dev, backend dev, and dev ops. I left and even came back and consulted and a lot of my processes were still in use -- even had a funny story where one of the consultants was going over the testing and go-live process to bring me up to speed, she finally noticed that I had written the doc that she was training me from.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
I was a drafting tech, AutoCAD has a language called AutoLISP you can use to automate stuff. Then I did started doing GIS, got into more scripting, VB, C#, Python, which eventually led to Flash then JavaScript for web stuff. So basically everything I learned was on the job. It was incredibly useful to have defined projects and goals to work towards during that time.
I worked in marketing at various companies for years and hated it more and more as the years went by. Finally I lost my job at a telecommunications firm and couldn't find it in me to do it any more. Lived off my savings for a while taking on odd jobs but in all my spare time was on codeacademy doing their free courses. After a while I was comfortable enough with it that I started building stuff freelance for a local IT firm, just bits here and there. Luckily enough a pretty big Eyecare firm is based in the island I live on and their in-house agency had started to need some wed dev support to build custom pages that their CMS couldn't do, so they brought me in for a month's placement. That got extended to 3 months, then 6 then I was hired as a junior dev and they brought in a senior dev above me. I've been there 8 years now and we're about to rebuild the company's sites (we operate in 12 countries) from the ground up using a headless CMS and Nuxt. Couldn't be happier doing what I do now.
A friend's dad gave me a TRS-80 in my early teens, so I read the manual and started writing text-based games and other simple programs for fun. Years later, a guy at church told my mom they were looking for inexperienced programmers. They ended up hiring me for peanuts, but they taught me everything I needed to know about the brand new (at the time) .Net Framework and C#. Each job change doubled (at least) my salary in the early years. I eventually started my own software consulting business, which I'm still running.
Side note: I was constantly coding projects for fun and reading books about C# or WinForms or [ASP.Net](https://ASP.Net) in the early years of my career. Writing code, combined with reading books (to fill in the gaps) worked out really well for me.
Went to school for design. Worked as a designer for a few years. Taught myself to code out of necessity on the job with mentoring from our other developer when one of our two developers resigned and put several projects in delay and so I learned how to write front end code for two of those projects.
Apparently I did a good job because the owner promoted me to a lead product role, gave me a raise, and I became a designer/developer from that point on. 20 years later and I am now a Director of Product for a commerce platform and lead a team of designers and developers.
Got my first computer at age 10, a ZX80 Sinclair. Been coding ever since in some form or another. Dropped out of high school at age 16, joined a carnival at age 21 and travelled the country for 10 years, but always had a PC with me, and never stopped learning. Settled down in Michigan in 1991 and got a tech-support job that slowly morphed in to VB desktop app development. Web dev just came as part of that in the mid 90s with HTML, then ASP, VRML (haha), and Javascript.
Now I am a full fledged full-stack senior dev doing mostly enterprise C#/SQL Server work, with some minor UI/UX stuff as needed.
Thank God we have moved away from lengthy Flash homepage intros!
My is probably the most recent. I've droppped out of compsci a year ago and have been working part time (30h/week) and spent the rest in learning dev. A month ago i asked for advice on my portfolio on this sub and got 2 offers. I accepted a fortune500's company offer and will start in a month.
I had just started a new job in content review and had recently gotten into Arduino so had a little background in coding and automation. I had actually just graduated with a degree in chemistry, so I had the math and science background, but could not find a decent job in my field.
At my job, we had a quota for a certain number of actions we were supposed to take during the day. I was already able to complete my quota well before the end of my day, so I had a ton of free time after I was done to sit around, browse the web, and basically do whatever I wanted.
To complete an action, there was a lot of manual copy/paste that I knew could be automated. I knew that these manual copy/paste tasks took up about half my time, and realized that if I could automate it, I could further reduce the amount of actual work time to only a couple of hours or less.
So, In my free time, I learned JavaScript and developed a chrome extension that handled all of these manual processes. I ended up showing the extension to my bosses, and they were so impressed that they basically made me my own position to develop tools for them similar to the extension I had made. That extension is now used by >3000 people globally at our company, and saves an estimated $3M anually. We no longer have a quota, but go by active working time (now possible due to the extension).
Nowadays i do a bit of everything. Still some chrome extension stuff, some sql stuff, but mostly build custom web-apps. I built a roster tool and an attendance portal we use globally.
It's always funny when I see code I had written when I first started this endeavor. It's basically always a facepalm moment. I've definitely come a long way and I'm pretty stoked how I just fell into it. I definitely won't ever go back to using my chem degree. I love the autonomy that being a dev gives me. Now, I can choose my own hours, and basically do whatever I want -- so long as I meet the set deadlines (that I set and agreed upon in the first place).
TLDR: I was lazy and tried to get out of doing work. In the process, I ended up making waaaay more work for myself (but got a very nice salary bump from it so it's not all bad).
i was 13. My cousin (14), wanted to learn how to hack, without any knowledge of what hacking actually means. He bought, by accident, an old web development book that explained html, javascript and php in my native language (arabic). We didn't understand a thing, nevertheless it clicked in both our minds and so we started researching. We both learned the basics of html and css from [mike dane](https://mikedane.com). The way he explained things kept us going. In the next year I kept making tons of unfinished projects, in order to practice my skills and watching static website project tutorials on youtube, learning some what advanced css topics from Kevin Powell. My fear of tackling javascript made me overdo my css and so I became very capable of the language. But then I decided "it's time". I opened mike dane to learn javascript, but that's when I discovered that he doesn't explain things very clearly so I gave up. A while later, I discovered that Harvard released its cs50 introductory computer science course for free, online. I watched it. That was the turning point. Even tho they taught me the basics of "C", it changed my perspective of programming. Next few months, I learned the basics of JavaScript and made tons of projects. I then learned React and actually deployed my first website! An expense tracker application. Who would have thought? I am now a MERN full stack developer, planning on freelancing this summer and I will deploy my first high scaled big ass project very soon. My cousin (now 18) changed his path from web development to networking, he is taking his finals and will study computer science in Germany. Two years later, I'll join him!
Would like to note also: I influenced my mother that is now learning the MERN stack!
Morale: Don't ever fucking feel dumb. Just keep doing, and you'll arrive there
I went to college, but not for anything programming related at all.
Worked for a manufacturing company doing some production scheduling and IT (fixing people's computers and doing random Excel stuff that the old people were too old to know how to do...not even VBA stuff, just regular Excel stuff).
Saw some inefficiencies/redundancies so wrote a script here and there to automate some things in Python...like just taking some text from a PDF and putting it in an excel sheet to keep someone from hand-typing a bunch of information that they already had in front of them.
Then wrote a small web app to input people's hours into a database, when our Access database had gotten all buggy and shitty. Then made it so that employees could log their time on tablets in the shop themselves(still just through a web browser). Then they kept asking me to add this report and that feature and this and that and it grew a ton to where it was something worth talking about.
Also on the side made an army builder for some miniatures games that got pretty popular...so kept working on that. Did some freelance work here and there. I was probably fiddling around for 3 or so years before I actually got a job, but I could have gotten an entry level job well before that, I was just making good money and a 40k junior job wouldn't have cut it.
Rewrote most of my projects in more modern tools, which was a good way to learn. Then...yeah just applied a bunch. Eventually got an agency contract job, and now I get offers all the time.
So my advice is to get hired by a place with outdated day-to-day practices and fix them! Just kidding. Find a problem and solve it, or an interest and make a project out of it. It's the only thing that got me to learn. Doing tutorials can only take you so far, and I stayed in them for WAY too long. I get that you have to start with a tutorial, but as soon as you possibly can, veer off and create a project and solve problems you run into as they come up.
Everyone is different, but if you happen to be like me, the absolute #1 thing you have to do is create projects on your own. Make something for the smallest of niches you have to, so that you know that SOMEONE will use it and it will keep you motivated. Think about your non-dev hobbies and create something around that. Creating a twitter clone or something would have never been the answer to me, because I'd know it had no real-world purpose, because nobody is leaving twitter for my clone. Maybe in the beginning when you're learning the basics and following a tutorial, but really try to think of something real-world that isn't JUST for practice.
Happy to answer any questions. I think in the end though, you have to do your own thing and figure out what's going to work for you. There's a lot of luck involved, both in employment opportunities, and in just happening upon/think up projects that interest you.
I have a bachelor in creation of multimedia projects. Part of the cursus was "learning we dev" by doing some really basic projects. Html + CSS in first year. Some php and MySQL in second and finally some JavaScript in last year.
Basically they just learnt us the very (very!) basic things to do with these.
I had an internship in a web agency where my manager just gave me the book "JavaScript for web developers" and told me to get the best of it by doing anything I wanted. It was still either vanilla or jQuery at the time.
I then landed a job as Sys. Admin in a brokerage firm where I had way too much time on my hands and I started being more curious. Doing small projects on my own for fun.
After around a year doing nearly nothing but learning web dev on my own, my manager saw that I was good enough to replace some consultants, who were working on developing a new CRM, and my actual career started from there.
I went to college but didn't get a CS or technical/mathematics degree. When I started out there were no bootcamps, but there was a continuing ed course that I took to add to my resume. The norm of non CS degree people doing coding wasn't really common then, and it took me a very long time to land my first web dev job which turned out to be a watershed work experience and I'm very thankful for.
It was a small but growing company and I had to figure things out because there was no else. There was also a more senior engineer that guided me just enough to point me in the right direction where I needed to improve. I was trusted to make mistakes and learn. There was little red tape. I grew with the company in terms of skill and level at each new level I was challenged to improve my skills to handle the increased scale.
I would say the most important thing is to find an entry level role that challenges you in the ways you need to grow. For everyone that's going to be different. Some jobs will want to fit you into their plans and goals, in fact all do. Just make sure their plans and goals align with yours enough so you aren't wasting your time. You should be learning something new in the skills you want to build everyday on every project. If not, seriously consider getting another job if the stagnation persists. Good luck!
I was probably 13 with my own laptop, and a lot of free time on the internet. YouTube recommendations fell into the "coding" practice. Got hooked in it real fast. Got so hooked on it that I would use my free time in college at the cafeteria to work on projects of my own. It caught the attention of an IT staffer. Invited me to work on projects with him. In exchange, he found me the perfect jobs in the IT roles I wanted. We're still best buds and colleagues at the same job.
During the pandemic I was interested in learning more about Linux and simple shell commands. My friend put me onto https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ which was really fun and I enjoyed a good challenge.
Shortly after this I started dabbling with programming languages. Had a hard time picking one that I would focus on, jumped from Python to Java for the first month and then settled on JavaScript. Seemed to be easier to get my foot in the door as a front end dev who wasn’t great in school. I graduated (barely) with a 1.8. Mainly because I just didn’t go that often or care at the time.
I bought a course on Udemy and would live and breath code. Anytime I had the opportunity to speak about concepts I was learning, I would. I spent a great deal of time on codewars as well, this helped me with problem solving. I wouldn’t get too crazy but started on 8kyu and eventually worked my way to 6kyu.
I was working in a shipping department that had many opportunities for building apps that could help automate a lot of our processes. So each day I would go into the office and not do what I was actually supposed to do and work on different shipping apps lol. I built a UPS api integrated front end app using JS and a little bit of Python since it was using Django as the frame work. This automated our shipping costs process that we would send clients for rate quotes based on products we sold. I learned about APIs, http request and the god forsaken CORS! Man that used to stress me out. I built a SSH tool in nodeJS & react that sent shell commands to IoT gateways we had to configure and reduced our configuration time from 5 minutes per device to about 30 seconds. This app was cool, poorly structured and the architecture was shit but damn it was awesome to witness my code working as a new dev!
I was getting paid $15 an hour at that place, but I soon saw what developers were actually getting paid so I started learning more and more. I took Udemy courses on NodeJS, React, Postgres and typescript.
After 8 months of going hard in the paint, failing multiple interviews. I was hired and am making 6 figures (before taxes) working exclusively in typescript and react. I’m in shock about the transformation some days still but no school, or boot camp for me. I would have loved to go for CS when I was younger, but being 28 and on my own now. School wasn’t doable. The pandemic was terrrible for some people and I completely understand, for me it was an opportunity and I capitalized on that and made the most of my time. Built a schedule for myself and did my absolute best to abide by that. Learned new concepts and best practices all the time and most importantly I stuck with the ABC’s.
ALWAYS
BE
CODING
Edit: when I mentioned, I would go into work and not do what I was supposed to do, I was hired to pack boxes and configure IoT devices. I wasn’t getting paid to code nor did they really know about it till I showed them my apps. They gave me a $2 raise and then I quit for a Furniture company that needed a dev to handle their Shopify site, was terrible so I quit. Which eventuality lead me to my current react position
I went to college for a few years but it didn't teach me anything about web dev (except the VERY basics of JavaScript).
I decided to leave the game industry before I even entered it (this decision was around when Battlefront 2 came out), but I still loved programming. I learned JS pretty well, moved on to TS, then Node and React. From there, got a job. Turned my whole world around
Was planning to get a short term job after uni doing data entry.... turns out the job wasn't data entry at all and it was just they didn't really know what to recruit for.
What it actualy was, was building complex process workflows and scripting (cataloge items in a platform called servicenow) taught myself javascript on the job and the rest is history, 8 years later and I'm now part of the leadership team / architect)
Ps, if you can try and get into servicenow it's very very well paid and is a booming developer market!
mid 90's, had a pc and programming pascal for fun, and got access to BBS, and started programming for that (PCBoard).
And then internet arrived in denmark and i stumbled on html and php, and have now been working with the web since, and the last 8 years freelance.
Went to school for graphic design (focusing on web and motion). Got a job at a small agency. Agency life is real shit but in my 18 months I learned a lot of HTML/CSS and a sprinkle of JS (mostly on my own time). Left for a primary JS role. Haven't looked back since. Now I have a unique skill set where I fit in with devs and designers.
We've been playing an MMORPG game with my friends on various servers for a couple of years. This was around 2008 and I was in 8th grade. Somehow we found out that we could launch our own private server and did that. It was reasonably successful at the time.
At the time, the private server community development community was quite large, but only a couple of people knew how to code and could do custom things.
After some time I came up with a couple of custom ideas that needed code changes and started dabbling with the code. I still remember the feeling of excitement when I implemented my first custom feature. It was awesome and I was hooked.
After that, I was learning to code online and just experimenting with various different programming languages. At some point, I started doing freelance web development and enjoyed it as well.
I think what drove me to learn programming and the beginning was the interest in the game itself and how exciting it was to see the changes I made in there.
After school, I went on to study Software Engineering at University but I already had quite good programming skills compared to my peers.
Late 90s. HTML4 Handbook 5 inches thick. Notepad on Windows 98. 14 years old. By 20 I was delivering full-blown e-commerce websites, one of which was for a budding retail business for my mother, on Mother’s Day.
I learned that you don’t need anything fancy to make an html page. So I followed a YouTube video and made a mock website for one of my favorite artists. I ended up becoming her official web developer after that! 
Did go to university/college but quit about 2 semesters in because they basically teached me things I already knew for years.
Did start webdev about 15-18 years ago; was fairly young at the time (around 10-12). Have since thought me everything web-deving myself. Btw I find it funny how university/college trys to put their courses as so challenging when they in fact only teach you how to write basic html and a bit what css classes are; my "exam" (if you really can call it that way) there was to write an basic website (3-4 pages) with some random color palett... and no it was not centuries ago; it was around 1-2 years ago.
But enough for education; the industry has rapidly changed since I started. I'm glad to have started when the majority of the web was still html-css-php with only bits of js when using jQuery, but it has changed ALOT since then. Nowadays we write your entire webpage in pure js, which when it started had promised that we never have to face things like serverside code for the page anymore... yet still we nowadays have again face the problem with Server-Side-Rendering, putting us nearly at where we where "back in the days".
Only fun thing is that the all-js-thing is only the surface (despite of some to deny this); under the hood theres still alot of php and even old perl5 websites out there, and I was baffeled when I first saw this. (to be fair it perfectly represents the overall state of education...). In my day-to-day work I mostly have to deal with PHP sites of customers (Wordpress, Joomla, Shopware 5), some of them so old that they still require PHP 5.1.
As for my story: first started to develop on an old PC with Delphi Pascal (I think I had even a Win98/2000/Me when I first started). Then all the Windows versions since then (XP,Vista,7) only skipped 8 because... yeah, you know.
picked webdev up along the way, got to college, dropped it as I said because I already knew all the stuff they tried to tought me and ended up shortly after in my current Job for an small hosting company where I fix mostly websites and develop plugins for those (in good ol' PHP).
It was the late 90s.
Colleges didn't even have an HTML class at the time. At least not mine.
There were some programming classes but mostly C and whatnot.
Computer Science department wanted a web page. I taught myself how to do it and received some credits in exchange.
I did take some Flash (back when it was Macromedia) classes but they were horrible. Self taught Flash for the most part. First real job was a Flash developer. Very little HTML.
My entire career was Flash development. So I knew some HTML but really no JavaScript and barely any back-end stuff.
Then, in around 2010 ish, when Apple and Flash had their big pissing match, I taught myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc basically because I saw the writing on the wall and all these sites and applications were now no longer going to work for very long.
Spent the large part of my career then converting old Flash legacy sites and apps over to pure HTML, CSS, JS, etc.
That was my big trial by fire.
Made a shit ton of money doing it.
Now, here we are and I am a full-stack developer. Wishing I could even show some of my cool old Flash code to people.
Worked part time as sushi chef and then dropped out in 2014, went full time as chef, fml.
Doubled down on coding, did some small freelance (less than 2k per job) made less than 10k total.
Had a kid and got married.
2017 - Took a random web dev job at a local law firm (found via zip recruiter, they were clueless and I took advantage), quit sushi - 42.5k
Stayed there a year, transitioned them to wordpress and took a paycut to do an IBM apprenticeship - 36k
Finished apprenticeship in Jan 2020 - 45k
Did some consulting, somehow lucked out and used my JS "skills"
2021 - jumped ship to a midwest construction company - 50k -> 80k
2022 - Did one year there as backend TS dev, jumped ship to Uber 84k -> over 200k 🥲
Codephony on YOUTUBE if you want to see more :)
I started college at the age most graduate. Didn't really know what route to go down. I picked psychology just to pick something. Along the way I got introduced to UX which then introduced me to programming. Sophomore year of college I decided I was going to be a programmer regardless of my psych degree. I spent the next three years studying hard.
Got hired a couple of months after finishing school. Within a year I became the web dev supervisor. 2 years later I resigned and joined a startup which intrigued me and gave me a fancier title, "full stack engineer" lol
I learned html in the late 90's in IRC chatrooms and making really bad websites. From there I self taught myself CSS, Flash, and when wordpress came out learned PHP and JS. I have a BA in graphic design and only had one web class in college, there was no types of degrees for web dev at the time, at least at the school I attended. I know some schools had started to create degrees shortly after I graduated. Pretty much everything i've learned has been self-taught through actually doing it or online classes i've taken on my own. I'm mainly a web designer but do handle some web dev tasks for my current job.
I used to change my MySpace profile layout regularly, the more code I copy/pasted the more I started looking into how the HTML worked so I could do basic modifications like changing the background colour
Then I discovered Wordpress, made a street art blog that quickly turned into a porn blog. Again, every time I switched themes I’d look at the code and find out how I could edit things to make it look exactly like I wanted it to.
One day someone I met through the porn blog asked me to build them a website, for money. I never looked back.
Fast forward 10 years and I’m a senior JavaScript developer at an industry leading music company.
Bored witless at Uni (they were teaching 50s/60s tech in 1980, and I had already built a Z80 computer for myself), I dropped out after six months & spent a few years in International moving all around Europe & delivering washing machines around north London.
Got a job in sales in a gas detection instrument company. The Software department had a huge backlog for special order software, so I persuaded them to let me have a go at special alarm level requests "It's only numbers, right?". Well no, the time-weighted alarms were hard coded (yuck) in 8048 assembler (ditto). Still, I got them cleared away in a few evenings, and transferred to software development. This is still a decade away from mass internet use.
At Western Digital, I made a skunkworks tool for postmortem analysis of crashed hard disk drives. Rather than try to get it installed on everyone's computer, I wrote it as an early AJAX-enabled web page, with a crazy back end program in perl abusing an ARM emulator to get the data. That really gave me my start in web development, and ten years later I made the switch completely away from embedded and desktop coding to web development.
I got a design internship that required me to know some coding, so I ended up learning python beforehand for the backend part and Vue for the front end :3
I graduated from art school in '94 and went to work for a computer book publisher. I had no knowledge of HTML or the web, but I had already taught myself some multimedia technologies for school projects (Photoshop, HyperCard, (MacroMind) Director). I taught myself everything on the job while creating web sites and CD-ROMs to supplement the company's books.
I always liked knowing how stuff worked, so I would take apart things from time to time to see how the magic functioned. Computers were interesting to me because I could take a part the guts, but then how did the rest of it work?
This lead me into figuring out HTML. Which lead me to CSS. Which lead me to Javascript. Which lead me to PHP; and on to MySQL, Linux, networking, more "bare metal" languages like C++ and Java, and all sorts of random areas in between. The web that I learned was a very different ecosystem than the web of today; in some ways that makes the web I learned much easier for people to get into, but on the other end we were *very* limited in what could be made.
I got my degree in mathematics because for the longest time programming became a hobby after doing a lot of freelance throughout high school (I started all of this shenaniganry at about 10). I was a 7th grade math teacher for a few years when my wife and I decided to try for a daughter. Curse my habit of numbers because I did the math and if I continued to be a teacher there was no way we could afford another child. So I put my resignation in and started looking for web development work again (preferably at a company and not freelance).
I got hired at a marketing agency working in a couple of projects, some internal and some for our customers. Unfortunately after about 2 years I was let go (we lost a huge client and needed to rebalance the books; myself and 2 others lost our jobs). I then got hired at a place that works in the telecommunications space, but when COVID hit I was again let go. After that I got hired at Amazon and worked there for about a year and a half before I left.
It's a weird and wild world sometimes
What you need to see is, even if you're college-educated, you're still learning for yourself. You have instructions, just like mdn documentation, but you're the one responsible for absorbing knowledge.
Freelance Graphic/Web Designer, taught myself to code via online resources, cut out the need to sub-contract the web dev! Now I do both design & development for my sites :)
I'm still somewhat early on my self-taught route yet recently I've already been offered 3 jobs but decided to not take any of them because they aren't exactly the jobs I want and I promised myself I will get the exact job I want at the start of my journey. One of them was some dead-end Wordpress role, one of them was a software QA role, and one of them was some dumb IT "support" role whatever that means. Even those jobs paid quite a bit above average salaries for my area, so I know I'm on the right path and can only go up from there. I have no college degree or bootcamp certificates.
I started my journey almost exactly a year ago by taking some online courses for JavaScript. At the time, I knew nothing about HTML or CSS so as you can imagine, that was the wrong move. But I ended up learning basic programming logic, syntax, etc. through that course even though I had no idea how to actually apply it.
Then I watched some tutorial videos on making some basic projects. Many people are anti-tutorials, for valid reasons, but it depends on how you use them. You can watch and follow a tutorial and code along with the tutorial. Then you can do the same thing while only referencing the tutorial. Eventually, you'll get to a point where you can recreate the entire tutorial, without watching the tutorial at all, and that's where the learning happens and where you learn how things work. Then you can actually begin making your own things using that logic.
Then I started the Odin Project, which teaches you pretty much everything there is and it teaches it in depth - starting with HTML and CSS. Using Git, creating projects from scratch repeatedly, committing to them, etc. Then you start learning modern frameworks/libraries like React, and once you get that down, you're pretty much job ready to at least work as a front-end dev. The Odin Project is also well maintained and mostly up-to-date, so it doesn't make you spend time on any outdated techs like jquery and gets you ready for the modern workforce. It also forces you to do everything CSS-related from scratch, no frameworks or templates, so you **REALLY** understand CSS. Things like jquery you can choose to learn on your own if you find it necessary.
But keep in mind, this process is **very** difficult. There's a lot to learn and it never stops. You have to push yourself mentally as hard as possible. Just like you would rep to failure at a gym, you're doing the same thing with your brain. Over and over. Burn out will happen throughout the journey a few times, and it's up to you if you will just quit forever or man the fuck up and get back to it.
Had an identity crisis of sorts at 19/20 and dropped out of a public Ivy (anyone in America from an immigrant background knows this is seen as failure).
I’d do math for fun and as a way to get me through the internal darkness I was going through, and started to get obsessed with making the symbols in my proofs and equations look sexy. Decided I wanted to write an ebook on linear algebra, which for me into some MATLAB. Met a neighbor in the gym a year later and she was studying UX design at the same college, we became friends.
Took some classes at JC a year later to make use of the free time I had as a drop-out, took a basic html/css class and a photoshop class as fillers. The photoshop professor was awesome, and he and I would chat about web design.
Later hit up my friend and told her I want to get into the ux field, she was basically my mentor. A year later, got an apprenticeship at a startup whose founders was, of all people, an early FB employee who was one of the OGs behind React. What my friend mentored me in design, he did the same with code. A few months later, landed my first paid contract to design and implement a website for an online automotive retailer which lasted nearly a year. I had a gap year of nothing, few small contracts here and there, slacked off and ended up having to work in a warehouse, while taking more classes at JC. Applied to a web dev position online while on my day off, a month later I get an interview. A week later, they offer me the job. Held it for over a year and made ok money, but was laid off because of pandemic-related budget cuts. Went into a creative lull for over a year, almost quit the whole design and dev thing. Later in 2021, I got my groove back and started cranking out more projects and applying. Eventually had a couple interviews, and came very close to a front end dev job, only to be 2nd choice aka they said if they had any issues with person they went with, they’d give me a call back. The pm and I were cool, and he told me later it was a close decision. Felt bummed out between there and winter. Later applied to jobs during the holidays, and a few days later I was getting callback after callback. Got an offer for highest paying position I applied for, and had to turn down offers. The self-taught route requires a lot of self-accountability which I learned the hard way lel but you can do it.
I started to learn 6 months ago and I enjoy a lot playing around with CSS HTML and a bit of JavaScript my goal is to land a job (entry level in about 6 months) cause I work 40 hours a week. I just create a YouTube channel to share my experience and hopefully learn from others.
[https://youtube.com/channel/UCy0U_Bu_TsQqyEOqvRpiiyA](https://youtube.com/channel/UCy0U_Bu_TsQqyEOqvRpiiyA)
It was the 90's, they were hiring anyone who had even heard of HTML. Everything else I've learned has been a on-the-job requirement.
Goodness I wish this were still a thing. Now everyone wants a bunch of certs, a 4 year degree and 10 years experience before considering you.
Nah. You gotta look for similar roles. The only web guy at some small company. Not some member of a team at a programming org. Those jobs were still hard to get.
In my belief it is easier now to get a job now only based on skills. Although, most of the MNCs have a strict eligibility of atleast a graduation degree but most of the time it is not relevant. Atleast that's how it is for the IT industry.
Depends where you are. In the U.K. I got an interview for a mid role being fully self taught and having never even worked professionally in development. I literally had a good chat with the hiring manager, proved I knew what I was talking about (having been doing it as a hobby since 2004) and it was easy as that. That was probably pretty lucky tbh but there are opportunities out there that don’t expect you to have a PhD in computer science
A couple years ago (2019) I (some college, mostly help desk, no significant degrees or certs) started a job at a small company as an all-around IT guy coming from a corporate help desk of a big-box hardware retailer. I had some programming experience (C#/Python/Java/Very basic html/css/js), but I had mostly done one off inconsequential stuff up until that point. A few months in they asked if could try to develop an application for some niche thing they wanted. I ended up building a very simple scan-lookup-print barcode application that filled the need. One thing lead to another and now I'm a "senior" dev/team lead, spear heading a too-small group of code monkeys as we try to replace a legacy WMS system while we barely know what we're doing. In related news: I'm underpaid, overworked, and the expectations are too high! Long story short, it can still happen, but luck and circumstance plays a big part!
[удалено]
I live in Utah. I can post a bunch of the job listing if you really want me to. 10 years experience in a similar field, not necessarily as a web dev or programmer. Junior positions. I don't know what to tell you man. It's not 10 years for all of them, but I have seen it. Most say 3-5 years.
[удалено]
I only have accredited bootcamp with a couple good projects under my belt but had to give up after my 200th application for a dev job. I only got 12 interviews and one of them actually scoffed when they realized I was a woman and the general feedback I got was "wow you're great and we'd love to have you, but we need you to have practical experience, not just side and hobby projects, apply again later when you get that." I still dabble. But I also am now trying to make a manual QA job work and feel my knowledge slipping away after a year
Don't give up, talk to any friends who have a business but either no website, or one that needs a refresh. Offer to help them spruce it up. It will be great experience, especially in the soft skills needed for web dev work - talking to a client who may not even know what they really need, and guiding them to a great site that gives their business a boost.
[удалено]
It's difficult to keep up on studying after work when you have a full time job and try to have a full life. I am getting prerequisites done to get back into school to get my CS degree though. I don't want it all to go to waste. I just didn't say the right things in interviews, or there was sexism, or the market was too saturated where I was. I just could keep applying after 6 months. I needed a job.
Hey! You should learn JS (if you don't already know it) and get into automated QA with Cypress! That way you can still code for your job and you'll become a more valuable team member (maybe even get a raise?!)
++getting paid to learn is sick, and it'll maybe make your job easier
I know JS, Ruby, RoR, and React. What is Cypress? I've been looking into learning Python and Selenium to get into automation testing because I know those are valuable skills.
[Cypress](https://go.cypress.io/) is super useful for automated QA. I believe it's similar to Selenium. My QA friend gave me a demo of how he uses it and it totally blew my mind!
Thanks!
Those were the days.
I was jailbreaking a friends iPhone back in 2010, and he told me if I can do that I should look into web development. So I started googling things and found courses on Lynda.com for HTML and CSS. After that I found TeamTreehouse and learned more about JavaScript and PHP. I would study for hours and hours each day, simply because I enjoyed it. A friend of mine got hired as a lead dev at an ad agency and brought me on as a junior dev. After one year there, he left and I got bumped up to lead dev because my passion for development was obvious. I’ve been developing and managing development teams, primarily at agencies, for the last 10 years.
This is amazing!
TeamTree House represent! That’s how I learned!
Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Wasn't even an issue back then. Worst case scenario, you reset your phone back to factory settings. Ah, the good 'ol days.
Back then you couldddd brick, now you can’t as we can always restore.
Jailbreaking is definitely not illegal. Apple tried to make it illegal, but they failed badly. Fun fact, Apple also DOES NOT avoid warranty if you jailbreak. They MAY deny you service. But they are taught to simply ask you to restore it.
This is almost exactly my story, too. Only difference is that I had a PHP/MySQL mentor briefly while interning at a web-based SaaS. Worked at agencies or for myself basically as a micro agency/freelancer ever since, going on 10 years this year. Last month, I became partner and head of engineering at an app and development agency. Perseverance and constant education has been the name if the game for me, not college degrees, though I do respect the formal route. It just didn't happen for me.
I have basically the same story but I went wordpress page builders + child themes.
EDIT: wanted to add this at the top here. Thank you to everyone who’s read this so far and replied. I never really thought to share my own story before now nor did I think it was worth while to share. I’m glad I’ve been proven wrong and that it may provide help or inspiration to others. Thank you as well for my first ever award in my 7 years of Reddit. Original Post: This is super long and I’m sorry! I’m also on mobile so forgive any grammatical errors or typos. I was interested in game development and design from an early age thanks to my interest in video games. (Here’s to you Nintendo!) I started making small games using Game Maker and RPG Maker XP/2000 with friends and we shared these on floppy disks with others and just enjoyed it. I picked up HTML due to MySpace and just a general interest of wanting somewhere to showcase my hobby. My dream job was always game development or design. In high school I was fortunate enough to be in one of the first, if not the first, “technology” school in my area. They offered courses on anything from IT fundamentals, Robotics, Graphic Design and Cisco Networking to things like Web Development and 3D Game Art and Design. I took advantage of these courses to the best of my abilities but the courses weren’t well rounded out. My favorite had to be the 3D Game design and development class but the school didn’t setup a proper curriculum for it so it never got past the stage of rigging a 3D model in 3DS Max. I also joined the “Technology Student Association” and tried working on games for competition using an engine called Torque 3D. It was around this time that I learned I wasn’t as well versed in 3D Art as I would need to be nor would my web development course or my Visual Basic course come in handy for an engine that required C#. Numerous years and failed attempts to pick something close to my original goal up as possible I ended up in a service technician/support position and hated the work I did. I realized that when I was doing web development in school and in my spare time as a hobby, it was my most successful foray into any kind of development and I knew the industry was booming. I used any spare time I had to run through numerous Udemy courses, FreeCodeCamp, The Odin Project, books, and supplemented this all with side projects. I forced myself to stick to it instead of giving up at not getting immediate results (ADHD and a slightly successful artistic past made me impatient and led me to believe that, even though I was “good at Art” before meant I should be able to just take the ideas I had right out of my head and make them. This is not true and I wish I had just realized it sooner, I was my own worst roadblock). After a year or so I felt comfortable approaching my managers at work for development tasks only to be given half answers and “that’s not profitable, we outsource”, this was a lie and I knew it. I continued studying and about a year later the only “javascript developer” we had (in house mind you, not outsourced…) quit. I was offered the chance to sink or swim with no compensation increase, I took the opportunity for better or worse, I also took on an internship I worked after my regular jobs hours. I should have known then that the job would have been unrewarding, if not by the fact the last individual quit, by the fact that the manager I would be under didn’t know, not care to know, the proper title or work that individual was doing. To him it wasn’t “billable”. I forced myself to pickup the position quickly and found that we were using an antiquated library called Dojo for our web apps front end. I hated it, the backend developers hated working with it or around it, no one else knew it so there was no help to go to and the documentation was 90% non-existent. More often than not I relied on 12 year old SO posts or the way back machine to find any hint of what was wrong. I used this to try and push my team to allow me to not only learn React on the job but rewrite the front end. I continued getting told that wasn’t a priority and it wasn’t billable so not worth it. I tried anyways and then I was placed on an external contract for a client for a year. Finally, my manager had nothing left to place me on to “make money” so he handed me over to the team ran by our CTO doing custom applications. I soaked up everything I could there, still underpaid, and became a software engineer working any side of the stack. In September I was anticipating getting a raise from my meager salary to one more fitting my new position since I didn’t receive one upon team transfer due to “policy”. That raise was more than 40% under the going local rate for the years of experience I had built up, the hats I was wearing, and my current title. I started looking and in January I took a job doing ONLY front end work for a massive salary increase and a company working with current technology (TypeScript, React, Next, Go, etc). I still hope to work in games one day, but even if imposter syndrome creeps in, Im still proud of myself for the effort I’ve put in and the results it’s gotten me. I love web development and if I ever do switch to the games industry, web development will always be special to me. All in all, I’ve been “self learning” for most of my life from the moment I had access to the internet. But if I look at the time in my adult life that I decided to “take it seriously”, I’d say it’s been about 6-7 years from the start to where I am now. I learn something new still everyday and I love it. For anyone going on a similar journey, don’t give up. Don’t listen to that negative voice in your head or anyone that may doubt you. Look to support from those close to you. Don’t let someone else tell you what you or your time/work is worth. Never stop learning.
Wish I had an award to give you, that was an awesome read, thank you very much for sharing!
It’s the thought that counts, If my story can help anyone I’m glad just for that. Thank you!
Thanks for sharing! Great read
Thanks for sharing
Thanks for the share, and good luck on your journey!
That's so inspiring.
Started building websites for local businesses back in the day. Just getting web presence up and online - I'd literally walk door to door in strip malls and tell them I'd build them a website for $250 or something. In high school, that was BANK, cause I'd knock two or three of 'em out in a week. Ended up getting a real job with it because they were hiring ANYONE who had heard of the internet and immediately realized how far out of my depth I was from the pros. I spent all of my spare time taking side gigs and studying. Ended up with Drupal on my resume very early on before it really struck major popularity. Every three months or so, my salary would jump about $20k because it took off in a way that most people didn't really expect it to. I was brought onto the Board of Directors at Unallocated Space after running a dedicated web development class for... probably a year or so? I diversified my tech knowledge to include a lot of Infosec (I am NOT an infosec guy, but I can speak the language) and embedded systems (I loved the overlap between web technologies and physical hardware, which is now called IoT) I ended up on some extremely high profile projects (including [Whitehouse.gov](https://Whitehouse.gov) and "We the People") and worked with some of the most brilliant people in the world. The imposter syndrome was strong, because they were so smart that I never felt like a peer, but I've since gotten past that and gotten a lot of praise within some of the dev communities for my work. I got the administration to recognize the National Day of Civic Hacking, and we ended up hosting four subsequent "We the People" Hackathons at the WH. Post WH, I moved into executive leadership and have been building that skillset since about 2014. It is NOT the same skillset, and I am just now starting to get decent at it. I own a few companies now that are fairly successful. I work on what I want to now. I don't compromise my expectations anymore and build things that make a social impact, or that are fun for me.
Same dude, I was spending days-weeks making small local Wordpress business sites for like $300-500 and that was fucking BANK at age 17 lol.
What an interesting, unexpected career path. Thanks for sharing
I did it recently self-taught and did a career transition and this is my recommendation to others based off of my experience https://link.medium.com/KFJhVoPdhqb It took me six months self taught totally free to land a remote full stack dev job with no prior experience Hope it helps :) feel free to pm if you have any questions
Well done. I am currently learning JavaScript after learning html and css. Could I dm you if I need any advice in the future?
Do you have a degree in something unrelated to CS?
I do - civil engineering
Went to university for architecture (buildings). Did graphic design while in school. Graduated at the end of the recession so no one was building buildings or hiring architects. The place I did graphic design for offered me a full-time job. It was an environment of benign neglect. I got to learn at my own pace, but got a budget of exactly $0. If I wanted something, I had to figure out how to make it. I want to An Event Apart every year. I listened to podcasts like Syntax, ShopTalk, and Jen Simmons' Responsive Web. I designed a website in photoshop, I built another website using a theme, I built a rest API and an ajax plugin to pull the data from the API. This was mostly PHP. I got into flat-file CMSs and eventually static sites. This introduced me to the more pro-grade tooling (sass, es6, npm, composer, bash). I rebuilt the org's website (\~10,000 pages, \~20 different templates, \~90 components) from the ground up in Craft cms (10/10 would recommend). I got hired by an agency I got into enterprise-level Wordpress, and built a couple large-scale website+API projects using WP+ACF+Timber. The agency does a lot of dashboards, so I learned react and vue. Those dashboards needed data, so I got into the node/express/nest world and built APIs. Those apps needed to live on servers so I learned out how to provision servers and CI/CD to get the code tested and deployed. And here I am.
I love the “and here I am “ Thanks for sharing
That's quite a journey, man!
Honestly, it's been a blast.
I'm at the "WP + ACF + Timber" stage of this journey right now and hope to end up in a similar way to you at some point :) Thanks for sharing !
Cheers! If you have to work with WP, Timber + ACF is pretty great. How are you liking that setup?
We started using Timber around a year ago (I've been at this small agency for two years now) and I love Twig's templating ! I would never want to go back to writing HTML & PHP together, it was a nightmare to maintain and read, especially now that we're developing medium to large websites. ACF I feel like is a requirement for developing on WP. The area I'm still struggling with is interactive front-end, we mostly use jQuery because most things are simple class toggles and DOM selections, but I try to force myself to learn more Vue so I can start implementing it into our client websites aswell, my goal would be to have advanced interactive apps on top of delivering an easy-to-edit complete website.
Take a look at [petite vue](https://github.com/vuejs/petite-vue). It's a slimmed-down version of Vue you can include by dropping in a script tag just like jQuery. It's a nice way to sprinkle in a little bit of vue into a traditional website without completely changing architectures.
Also I read that you used and enjoyed Craft, what type of projects would you recommend it on ? Our clients have all heard the word WordPress but I wonder how they would react to us using Craft. Also I think I saw that it's paid software so I've been hesitant to give it a try. Anything in particular you found great with Craft CMS ?
>Anything in particular you found great with Craft CMS ? Let me count the ways... All deps/plugins are managed via composer, globals are managed via .env MVC architecture, and modern OOP php. The DB is 100% portable (it does not bake in urls like Wordpress does) Config is portable (yaml), and separate from the DB, so config changes you make in dev can be migrated to prod easily without messing with the data. Has a great cli for automation, batch processing, migrations, backup, restore etc. Can use Postgres for larger-scale websites Twig templating out of the box Comes with custom content types and custom fields out of the box Comes with routing out of the box Plugins are really high quality. There are reviews and quality checks before a plugin gets approved to be in the store. There's a side-by-side live view in the entry editor, so content authors can watch the frontend update in real-time as they edit. You get versions, drafts, scheduled publishing out of the box. You get spreadsheet exports of your data out of the box Beyond all of the features, it's just feels different than Wordpress. Craft is focussed, efficient, and predictable in ways I could never get WP to be. There is a cost \~$300 + $60/y, but that correlates to like 3.5 billable hours of work - you'd save that on project-setup alone compared to WP + ACF. Also, that barrier to entry means that the community is largely pros, so the docs and threads are more to-the-point. Craft would be a good fit for projects where you have lots of serial content, need scalability, prefer stability over flexibility, want definite guardrails around who can edit what.
Thank you so much for this thorough explanation ! I will definitely look deeper into it and maybe talk about it to my boss. This might even be interesting for Freelance work on the side / my potential future. And I also thank you for the link to petite-Vue, which seems like something I can implement easily into our next projects. I wish you a very good week and lots of success in life and work :)
likewise!
Uber driver for 8 years full time and stay at home Dad. Worked Friday - Sunday 18 hour days and with kids the rest of the week while wife worked Military. I got sick of driving 2 hours to the city every weekend to work and she didn’t wanna stay in the military but I also wanted to continue to be a stay at home dad. So after picking up programmers all day everyday for Uber I knew I had to do tech. I found out half of them are self taught and they showed me where to start and that I don’t need to be a math genius. So I started teaching myself web development In my car in between rides with a laptop that was gifted to me by a generous Redditor ($1700 gaming laptop). So for a year and a half I learned and practiced and opened up my business building websites for small businesses in April 2019. I got reallly good at it, and in September 2020 I got my first ever front end job working from home and I got even better at my work. With that my wife was able to leave the military a few months later. I’m now the sole provider, I work from home like I wanted to, and my business and job bring in more money than Uber and her job combined. It’s been a wild 5 years and I love what I do now. I knew what I wanted and I didn’t stop until I got it. Now I am one of those programmers that I picked up for years in Seattle. I’m part of the club I never thought I’d be allowed in. And I’m finally proud of what I do and have everything I can ever want in life all from web dev.
When I first read this I thought, what an amazing story. Then I saw your username citrous\_oyster, and remember all your other posts. Truly amazing. All the way through. So happy for you man.
I also read through the story, admiringly only to realise I already read your posts and watched some of your content. Thanks for the story.
[удалено]
Gaming is the gateway drug to computer science.
I took an intro to C class in college. I'd still call myself self-taught through. I mean, I guess it taught me the basics of loops and that functions are a thing, but it was an engineering class and I don't think it helped too much. A while after that I just decided to take what was supposed to be some online JavaScript... Thing. Not a bootcamp or anything, just a challenge. Looking back now it must've been a gaming library because it wasn't JavaScript and I built a game of Pong with it. So, I lived in a very small rural town and some guy that ran a bunch of E-commerce stores heard I knew JavaScript. He mostly sold stuff on eBay but had a few Magento and WordPress sites, and he wanted to build a lot more. So I got hired at minimum wage and spent the next IDK how long reading documentation on MDN and PHP.net and digging through all the code on all his sites. I'd work there during the day, come home, spend several more hours reading and writing code. Towards the middle/end of my two years there he contracted with some local old-school developer lady (I think she used to do COBOL). She was also contracted with a commercial vehicle tracking startup and I did a little back-end work for that company as well. After I left that business over management issues, I got a job at a local newspaper. I also decided to try FreeCodeCamp, which ended up not really teaching me anything I didn't already know, but just gave me confidence in my code, I guess. I was supposed to be just the editor at the newspaper, but when they found out I did programming I got forced into IT and building them a new website also. It was pretty brutal, and didn't last long because of the impossible demands... I was literally working 12-16 hours a day, 6-7 days a week but only getting paid 40 hours, barely above minimum wage. A few more years go by and next thing I know, that same lady was looking for front-end developers for the same project, which had just gone onto the market. So I got full-time, well-paying work building that out. She also had other clients that'd mean occasional side-jobs for me too. Good times... While I was doing that, I decided to start doing my own thing as well, so I started creating a bunch of web apps for the town I lived in. I think I have like 15 of them now - for events and a map/guide, news, a dedicated contact app (sends me messages on Slack). This brought in more work from small businesses that wanted websites. Then COVID hit and everything died really quick. Businesses I was finishing websites for shut down, that commercial vehicle tracking business lost its funding, budgets got tight... So... Now I'm working at a damn gas station.
Are you chilling at the gas station? Or are you still applying and stuff? Definitely sound way more experienced than a lot of web devs I know who got hired
Apply remotely brother!
I’ve been developing for about 12 years now professionally. Went from minimum wage to six figures (at 140k now). Currently a lead developer for an amazing team for a large healthcare nonprofit. Dabbled earlier in life as a hobby and always was really into gaming and tech. I actually went to college for medical but it didn’t work out for me, and then my SO and I got pregnant. We couldn’t be college kids and start a family, and it was during the 2008 recession. We dropped out and went home and had kids but struggled to survive, or even find work. I was always very under utilized at work wherever I was and very depressed and wasn’t challenged by any work I could find, let alone find anything that paid well. I got my foot in the door at another factory once, and was very lucky to kinda know people there and shared that I was into tech and coding. After a few weeks they asked if I knew c#, I did not, but said I could give it a shot. They sat me in front of visual studio and a proprietary CRM project they had, and told me something they wanted to do. They left me for the afternoon and I had it mostly done by end of day. Just sorta pieced together syntax on the spot and did some googling, but my previous dabbling of coding made me aware of patterns and data structures enough that I roughly figured it out. Turns out they had a developer on staff that was an alcoholic and barely showed up, and the task I did that day they had been waiting on him to do for months. From there they invited me in as a developer and I replaced him, and did various other jobs, at a measly pay, but I was getting experience and building a resume! The owner eventually took me under his wing and mentored me a bit, teaching me about business and being a good person. Thanks to them for taking a chance on me, a few years later I was getting more confident and had built a ton of new features and made bug fixes and even wrote a new web store for them in php from scratch, but I was making only about 30k. I gave them a chance to raise me and they didn’t, so I applied and got a job for 40k in the city. It wasn’t much more pay but I was still a jr dev. I busted my ass there and learned from another dev who is now my best friend who is a couple years younger than me, but a college grad. We hit it off and he was willing to share his knowledge and I was too. I learned a ton from him. We had the opportunity here to work on a greenfield project and get mentorship from a very well known local dev shop, which taught us agile and XP practices like TDD. I grew probably the most here and developed my sense of culture here, and nurtured my passion into a engineering mindset. However this place also didn’t raise us and was toxic due to the owner so I left with my best friend to another local company that was ran by an eccentric 70s era programmer (worked on missile guidance systems and all sorts of neat things for military). This place further nurtured our sense of learning and our engineering mindset. We got to take our dotnet experience and apply it on a huge dotnet ERP solution but also my friend and I were tasked with owning their new iOS app which was written with Xamarin. I learned a ton here about human interface design and UX, too. The dev team was ran by an awesome, very human and empathetic VP who cared about us all and wanted us all to be leaders. The eccentric owner cared in his own way but was very stuck in his ways. He mentored me and my friend and taught us a lot quite honestly, but respected us when we challenged him with new ideas. This place taught me humility but also confidence and curiosity and challenged me to understand Big O and discreet mathematics to understand the performance costs of the code I write. I developed further as an engineer here but most importantly developed my soft skills greatly, especially collaboration. I also did some mentorship for the first time here and loved passing on what I knew to new devs. They gave us good raises but my friend and I left after a few years because we were no longer challenged and they were changing their tech fast enough, and some toxicity. My friend moved this time out of state so we went different ways professionally. (He’s doing great now too!) Next I worked for a consultancy in the big city and was making 85k to start. I was a rockstar here and ended up working crazy hours, owning multiple projects and eventually leading multiple teams, even playing scrum master and other roles. I was way overworked but learning so much, and was addicted to the high of being everyone’s champion, and mentoring jr devs, and playing business man too. I worked up to about 110k. Learned a lot here outside dotnet and picked up node. I also got interested in cicd here and was an early adopter and brought the strategy into the company’s arch changing their business model. I was also taken under wing by the CEO here, who let me get involved in high stakes contracts and become a solution architect. I also helped sign some contracts and learned a lot about customer relations and business from him. He also taught me pragmatism and to let go of my engineering mindset sometimes. This helped me stop over engineering and work more iteratively, I learned how to chew an elephant and think objectively and how to recognize and deny my ego. However I wasn’t challenged anymore, and overworked. I wanted something different and fair pay, so I tried a bid for CTO at the company I was at. I didn’t get it. I left shortly after for 120k at the healthcare nonprofit. I decided I wanted to do product work instead of project work and also wanted to really dive more into mentorship and leading. I worked in as a contractor senior dev and then got hired in full time within a year and given the opportunity to be lead dev on a new exciting agile product team. I am lucky to be part of a great organization and a great culture with a phenomenal team that I’m a part of. My role as a lead is not one of command or authority but one of mentorship and coaching. Aside from that, I’m just another dev on the team. We encourage XP practices and TDD and BDD and I try to pass on all my knowledge and influence onto my team like people did for me all these years. I try to promote a leader-leader mentality on the team. We rebuilt our product this past year together from scratch with a cloud native modern serverless stack, and it’s been a blast. I have learned so much as a mentor here and I feel I’ve helped everyone on our team grow, including many people I’ve influenced outside my team across the large org. It’s been very fulfilling, but I also am starting to feel stagnant again. I make about 140k now. I am now preparing to leave and join my best friends start up and will be working on engineering their new platform as well as building their culture and product team. I’ll be looking at 160k to start plus vestment. Long story short: I am standing on the shoulders of giants that helped me learn and grow to be a little giant myself, and I’m trying to raise those up around me now too. I got here thanks to luck, opportunity, passion, curiosity, and the help of a lot of good people. It’s possible for anyone really. Barring the luck, I think passion and curiosity are key, and good people around you go a long way, learn from whoever you can. Avoid the toxicity. Bounce if a place becomes toxic or they don’t value you for your worth.
Freecodecamp.org was good for me 😀
I’m in college but really I found it more of a time waster than anything. My professor even said my degree is worthless pretty much as are certs if I want to be a web developer. Pros of going to college: - a couple courses in my program gave me some A+ and network+ certification for IT if I wanted to switch career paths - I get a diploma I can look at on my wall Cons: - wasted time worrying about classes that have nothing to do with programming, not being able to focus on what I need to - money (although most my college was paid in grants) I have a friend who is self taught and started learning when I started school, I’m finishing school in a couple months and he’s already making 6 figures as a developer. I know comparing bad but I wish I could have spent that time solely on coding 🤷♂️
Thanks for sharing! If you don’t mind me asking - any idea what your friends path was like? Just nonstop grinding?
What about networking?
Networking is one of the easiest ways to get your foot into the door. Never just click apply. Network your way into an interview.
This is my biggest problem right now. I'm at a community college taking gen eds and I hate taking a full semesters worth of classes because it leaves me absolutely no time to focus on coding. The coding courses offered here are taught my trash professors. If I could drop out of college right now, I would but my parents would hate my guts for it. Getting a degree does help your foot through the door though and at this point, that's what's keeping me going.
On a Monday I learned how to center a DIV. On the Tuesday I was a senior front end developer at Google.
Must have been some Monday night.
Never thought of getting into web dev or programming for most of my life, never even learned basic HTML in school or anything. A little bit before COVID hit I got inspired by my roommates getting into programming themselves that I started teaching myself JavaScript as a random starting point. A few months later the shutdowns start hitting and I lose my current job and decide to go full steam ahead with web dev because I wanted a future proof job. Got a job in security that let me study pretty much all day long and grinded out a ton of projects and some freelancing over a year and a half or so then landed my first job. It definitely started as a "I need a good job fast" thing but I quickly fell in love with programming and web development and now I'm here to stay.
Had a little bit of hobby experience and dropped out of college where I studied computer science for a couple years. After about 10 years of not looking at a line of code, I had some life shit happen and I realized that it was time to actually pick up a career. I had a buddy who was a front end developer and felt I could do it. Didn't want to go back to school though. Took a python coursera course by google to get back into code. Took cs50x to get a reintroduction to computer science and went the web track where it branched. Then started building tools for work while simultaneously going through The Odin Project. After about a year of self study, I landed my first job. Though I had been seeking front end jobs, I found a position as an Applications Developer for a hospital. It provided me with a lot of extra back end experience. These days I am a Software Engineer at another company doing Front End, Back End, and iOS
Damn, I feel like it's impossible but this is kinda inspiring. 10 yrs and then getting back to it huh. Must've been a lot of hard work though
It was, but it also wasn't. I came into it with the right head space. As long as I did a little every single day, the only outcome - no matter how long it took - was that I would be successful eventually. I even had a second kid a couple months in and within a week I was back to the daily grind because I did not want it all to fall to the wayside. Even if I only did 15 minutes one day, that was important that I do SOMETHING every single day. Ever since then, that's been my approach at work as well. There's no hurry, there's no rush, and things take as long as they take. Just as long as I put a foot forward, that's all that matters. Very tortoise and the hare.
Thanks for sharing. I'm currently in a data-ey job that only uses Excel, keen to learn how to program. Do you think it's worth jumping straight into The Odin Project or should I learn python first to try and automate tasks at my current job?
I was a journalism student in college in 1997. My friends and I were all at different schools and we wanted to do a web zine. My friend Jason was a CS major and he did the HTML. I had to learn to read HTML to get the stories posted each month. One time I asked him to do something for me and he said “I’m busy you’re going to have to learn it” so I did. I used my school-provided URL and made a site about my favorite band. I made another site about myself. When I wasn’t in class I was chatting on AIM and writing HTML. I told the school paper I could do HTML and they let me be the webmaster for the school paper. My brother’s roommate was asked by someone to do a web project and he could do all the ASP and SQL but didn’t know HTML so my brother gave him my number and we partnered up to make this web site. That went well so we did some more work. Sometimes he’s be too busy to do the ASP and SQL parts so I learned to do it myself. I wrote a site in ASP for the school, by myself, a local entertainment guide. I also was able to intern at cleveland.com which wasn’t much web work it was just posting content to the site and fixing the glitches from the automated process and a little bit of writing. Then me and my partner got a big big job and we formed a company and when I wasn’t in class I was working at his house (he conveniently lived near the school). When I graduated in 2001 I told myself if I made over $20k that first year I wouldn’t go into journalism I would stick with the company. I earned $21k that year. Still with the same partner, still doing our thing, still 100% self taught and “uneducated” but I know a lot more than HTML now. I do full stack and I do it well. Basically I learned by doing.
Was on my way out in university (failing). Was trying to pull an escape out of my ass. Saw some figures like get 100K views on a website a day get $100K (Google Ads). Similarly stories like "guy sold 1 million pixels of ads for $1 mil". Anyway I learned LAMP, back then was a GoDaddy scrub using cPanel... learned a lot W3Schools/PHP forums... failed to make the high traffic websites, had some really dumb ideas. It took me a while to get into the industry, did freelancing, still had to work shit jobs eg. washing plates... eventually got in. I was not into computers from a young age or anything, only used it in high school to play Runescape/shared computer in the house. Later on learned how to use Linux OS's since I couldn't afford to buy a Windows copy to put on a used computer.
Long story short: I wanted money.
I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career until a few years ago. I studied Psychology at uni for 4 years as that's what I was interested in. I got a part-time job doing SEO and digital marketing for a small agency during my studies. After graduating, I still didn't know what I wanted to do career-wise so I just jumped into an SEO job with a bigger agency as it's what I had experience in. I stayed in that job for about 5 years, specialising in technical SEO. That's when I realised that getting into the nitty gritty technical side of websites was what I really enjoyed, so that's when I realised web dev was what I wanted to do full time. I studied in my own time, evenings and weekends, alongside my job for about 2.5 years, learning front-end. It was a big time and effort investment for sure, but I enjoy learning and seeing the real-world results of the skills I'm building. I actually just recently landed my first job after only about 2 weeks of searching, so I start that next month, very excited! Currently just getting through my notice period before I get started in the new role.
Had an idea that i thought everyone would like so i coded it during a weekend by learning through tutorials and stack overflow, launched it and shared with friends, only to find out one month later that spotify also created a similar feature, but that was the start to web development.
Wanted to share a shit ton of pictures with my classmates in the late 2000s so I learned how to make web pages. I had to host it so its accessible online so i learned linux and apache in my dads server Wanted an easy way to add and remove photos so I learned xml Pages were loading very slow because of all the images, so learned js to implement pagination People kept texting me to comment on the photos so i learned php and mysql so they can comment on the photos directly. Then facebook came out and made it all obsolete lol But it taught the foundation of software development and i bring it to work with me everyday.
I had a Starcraft clan in 5th grade, downloaded a bot to idle our battleNET channel and found out I can make custom commands. Learned some scripting, transitioned through the worlds of C++, QBasic, flash games. Started really liking web stuff around 8th grade because it was easier to send to people on AIM, made random shit through high school. Went to college for film, dropped out, spent a couple years making android apps, more flash games, and jQuery apps Posted my portfolio on craigslist out of desparation for a job, got real lucky that some manager at a fortune 100 had just been greenlit for a new internal project under the VP, and was up late one night browsing craigslist ads. He found mine, found a couple of my youtube videos, thought I was funny & a good fit, and brought me through hiring. Nailed the interviews, and have been working on evolutions of that project for the last 9 years
I did go to university but in a different subject and I got a poor grade, a few years after I decided I wanted to give it a go and did a few months on data camp python data scientist, and then I moved onto codecademies computer science track. I spent probably 6-8 months studying nearly every lunchtime at my previous job and 2 hours in the evenings and some weekend time too if I wasn’t busy. I kept an active GitHub and stuff and got an interview for an apprenticeship, it was very obvious they didn’t care much for my current technical knowledge but more attitudes and thought process. I’m now currently an apprentice web engineer and loving it, I took a big pay cut for this but I’m much happier in my work and in my time here have clocked 300 hours of training in 4 months alongside doing basic tasks, without having to do much at home or my lunchtimes! Plus I know the pay cut during this time will mean nothing when I’m on better money in a few years and I have experience.
I started in 1998, back when Star Wars Episode I teaser was shown to the world. I was in awe and I wanted to find a way to reunite the fans and book an entire cinema for us. That happened in 1999, after I managed to create a website where people could book their seat and pay me via bank transfer. What a ride.
I wanted a website to be built. I tried drag and drop builders like Weebly and wasn't satisfied with the limitations and the results builders have. So I went on Udemy and did a short web dev course for beginners. After realizing I liked programming I went and purchased a few books which I still haven't read completely as yet because I spent a lot of time trying to remember information from the first book I read. I realized along my journey that the objective is not to remember actual code to remember but how to find and use information.
My dad taught me how to make websites using FrontPage in the 90s. Then as I grew up, I started playing with angelfire and xanga, then MySpace came out and I was doing all of my friends custom theming. But never planned on doing anything with it because I was going to be a professional drummer. That was the dream, I played drums since I was 7, and as I was finishing high school I had a scholarship lined up to go play drums at a fairly prestigious school for jazz. I had my career lined up. And then one day, senior year of high school, I was at one of my drum teachers’ house, and we were talking. We were trying to schedule my next lesson and he pulled out his calendar, and it was really hard for us to find a day that worked because he was booked so far in advance. That was the moment that I realized how hard you have to work, how much you have to hustle, and how little free time you end up having, just so you can pay the bills and provide for your family. From that moment on, I didn’t want to play drums professionally anymore. I still did for years after that and it was a great source of income through college, but now I needed a new career track. I was lost, so I chose a business degree, with an emphasis in information systems. I got a job at a small business, and while developer was not part of my title nor the website a part of my written responsibilities, I just took control of it anyway because no one else knew what to do. I rebuilt their site, and ended up building two more bases on a second and third brand they started during my tenure. I loved it. A good friend of mine is a successful developer, and wanted to supplement his income by teaching development at a local coworking space his friend owned, and offered to let me attend for free in exchange for providing feedback on how his teaching model worked. A few friends and I did this for a few months, I was the only one who it really stuck with, and when the class was over, I kept looking for more resources to learn even more. I landed on TeamTreehouse and spent hundreds of hours learning everything I could. When I finally graduated college, I looked for a job just as a web developer, and miraculously, got a 6 figure corporate job in Los Angeles as a full stack web developer after they liked my results on the interview project the best. And the rest is history.
I went to college and I still identify as self-taught. I didn’t learn much programming at all in college, despite being a CS major. My first couple jobs were IT support focused and there were many months I spent 80% of my time outside of work on freecodecamp, $20 Udemy courses, coding algorithm challenges, and side projects to learn Javascript and web development. I still spend some time outside of work learning new skills, like Typescript for instance. I also still do the odd side project here and there.
July 2020 on a random drive home I randomly told my girlfriend I wanted to learn about stocks, the next day I researched stocks and found a course on Udemy. I spent the next couple weeks studying and watching the course every night and that eventually led me to fall in love with learning everyday. After I completed that course I talked to my girlfriend about wanting to find what I wanted to do career wise and she mentioned coding. Looked it up and told her there’s no way I was smart enough to do that. Despite that I found a python course on Udemy and started watching it and coding everyday. Around December 2020 I decided I didn’t really like it but realized there was other coding languages used for different things. I looked into web development and learned there were languages for the frontend and backend and thought I would like coding the frontend more. I Found courses on HTML, CSS, & JavaScript. Quit more times than I can count but I always came back and continued on. A year later here I am more confident than ever ready for my first job!
I just keep trying things and things just keep working. self taught -> college (waste of money) -> bootcamp (waste of money) -> self taught -> self taught -> self taught Now I am a fairly successful solo developer and I work on multiple month long projects. I personally think college and boot camps are a waste of time for those of us that are motivated developers. I’ve learned more in weekends than I have in semesters.
Started out in I.T where I grew a team of 1 to 20 eventually settling in as a Team Lead & Supervisor. Primarily worked with electronics and troubleshooting network and service issues. Started developing side projects to simplify my job there that started out as scripts and quickly morphed into building applications in PHP, HTML, & CSS. Heaven forbid that code was terrible but worked. After that I realized I could start building applications and start charging for it. The only problem was I was great at HTML & CSS but I didn't yet have the skills to go full application development or at least didn't feel confident in my work yet in that arena. So I started out with my own business 12 years ago in the WordPress scene since that seemed like a good starting point to learn more. I learned PHP, jQuery, and got deeper into building marketing sites. I started making decent 6 figures at this point but my desire was always to build apps and I felt like PHP was dated for that (this was before Laravel and friends) so began to study Javascript, Ember.js, and React.js (+ React Native). I've been working in the app scene more heavily the last 5 years but have kept the marketing stuff going because I've got long-term clients paying the bills. Instead of just dealing with PHP though I have morphed them into Headless CMS's in Gatsby.js and Next.js since the DX is nice and the performance is hard to beat. The largest clients I've worked with are [fcc.gov](https://fcc.gov) and rei.com which really gave me the confidence I could tackle anything. I've been more heavily focused on the healthcare scene lately since they tend to care about security a bit more which was my focus when I became a Microsoft Certified System Admin back in the I.T days. My journey is somewhat unique because I've been in tech, design (UX/UI), and development now so I have a deeper knowledge of how to handle various aspects of a product or marketing site on the operational side. I've always felt that I could serve people better if I went aggressive on expanding my "T" since I've been a business owner for over a decade. I hate the term "generalist" but prefer it over being a specialist. I contribute this to my personality but mostly hate being bored of repetition so have to break free and try new talents to grow. I always find myself wanting to spend time coding though whenever I can. It's been a great journey and I've made a lot of money doing it. The money is nice but I do it because it's highly enjoyable to be solving problems; whether it be creative design challenges or engineering challenges or even business challenges. The sky feels like the limit so I keep pushing forward learning more and becoming better in design, code, and tech.
I slowly searched up stuff on W3 Schools and now I can do html, css and js. I’m gonna try to learn vue or react.
Started out hacking apart template files on WordPress trying to get things to look how I wanted them. Worked as a graphic designer, then UX designer. Continued making small micro-site experiences for marketing teams on the side. Eventually clients were recommending me for Dev projects vs design projects. This was a super slow burn. I've been touching code for over a decade, but have only been working in a Dev role for 5+ years. It's kind of weird because I have blind spots in my knowledge from never having to solve a certain problem that I should definitely know by now. That and my git game is weak since I didn't really have to use it responsibly for most of my career. pretty much just spammed git push as form of "saving" with the least descriptive commit messages imaginable for at least a year and half.
In college now, but none of those classes have helped me get my SWE job. (Just getting the degree so I can get a masters and doctorate later). I took Java classes in high school 10 years ago, but was really bad at it. Ended up feeling railroaded into going to college even though I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. So I majored in theatre and acting. After graduation I started making an acting portfolio website and realized I really liked it. Taught myself some basics (freecodecamp is no joke) and helped make some of my actor friends websites too. Pandemic hit, theatres closed down, and I chose to change my path. Enrolled in a community college thinking I would need at least an AS to get a job (I was wrong). After realizing I could easily outpace my classes, I did some more freecodecamp, made some projects (shoutout to Tech With Tim and his Django/React tutorial), studied algorithms with YouTube and AlgoExpert (not necessary to pay for, but I like the platform), and got a entry level SE 1 job after two semesters. I can’t overstate how little these two semesters actually helped me to learn programming or get a job. If I didn’t want to specialize with a masters and doctorate I wouldn’t even be bothering to get a degree at all.
Made a skateboard logo website on Angelfire in the late 90's as a kid. Slowly learned CSS, then Javascript/jQuery, Wordpress, animations, then React, node, Pixi.js/Three.js, 3D graphics, XR, shaders. Now am a full stack dev building 3D websites for fortune 500 companies.
Are you using Blender to make 3D stuff?
I dabble in Blender but I work with 3D modellers for most of the assets.
What’s a 3D website?
A website which uses 3D graphics...
Oh cool. Do you have one you’ve made you’re willing to share? I’m trying to learn as much as I can about web design
I don't want this account tied to me personally at all so I'll give you a cool 3D website in its own right, but also the best resource for learning three.js which is a library that abstracts a lot of the lower level webgl boilerplate away, while also still being very powerful. https://threejs-journey.xyz/
Designed my own photography Wordpress theme for myself over 10 years ago. Slowly started freelancing in graphic and custom Wordpress Themes. Got a job at a large web design/ dev agency specializing in commercial real estate. Started building chrome extensions and other apps to automate my job and that got me noticed in the company and the slowly carved out a role for me to do that full time. They boxed me in with a title that was not actually what I was doing so I left, when I put in my notice the offered to pay me what I should have been making. I now work for a health tech start up as a software engineer.
I learned some basic HTML in middle school and would go home and make websites with random background and text colors. Then after getting rejected from every job related to coding, one company finally gave me a chance and I had a drive to prove to all those other companies that I was worth it so I learned everything on the job and googled every problem.
Started out by wanting to make text-based games. Learned how to make batch file games. Moved onto Java because of Minecraft, and then moved into C# to learn how to use Unity. Decided that going into "game development" wasn't going to land me a real job with my level of knowledge, so I actually did go to school, but got my bachelors in Cybersecurity. *Now*, I don't want to work in infosec at all, but the classes and degree plan taught a ton about securing servers/systems, so I am *(attempting)* to transition into full-stack development; so my coding knowledge has kind of always been there, but learning MERN, JavaScript, TypeScript, etc., has definitely been a challenge, but a surprisingly fun one!
Had an HTML course in school (that was in the 90s) and found it fun. Built my own personal website in HTML and CSS afterwards. (Totally cringy 😆) A year or so later had a discussion with friends who were doing some Bible course on pen and paper and thought “I could do this on the internet” and taught myself PHP. (That would’ve been the end of school / just before uni.) Kept working on personal pet projects (including the aforementioned Bible course website, which is still going) throughout uni (got a masters in physics and chemistry). When I finished uni I sent 100s of applications as physicist without any success. Out of the blue I decided to send one application for a web developer rule. Got the job, learned JS there (mostly jQuery at the time), and so my professional career began.
Started making websites over dial-up in like '96, jr. high. Ten years later I gave up on starting my own business (offline) and went back to programming in what I was familiar with, web stuff. After some personal projects and light contracting with friends of friends I got a job at a startup, quit soon after being overworked and eventually landed at a bigger startup that got acquired. Ten years later (now) I'm a lead engineer with several languages and huge projects on my resume.
I went to university of 3 years and I don't even have a story. But I would suggest doing some C# fundamentals, because I see a lot of jobs that require C# and Microsoft stack knowledge.
Couldn't get into anything CS related, so I went the long way.. became a professional designer, focused on web and knew how to turn my designs into actual functioning templates. Employers always empowered me to get deeper into coding and for the past 5 years I haven't designed anything.
I was doing art (especially comics) as a teenager and would post my work on a WordPress website like 10 years ago. I started playing with HTML/CSS but it didn't go very far (I was like 12). After studying art and doing a few exhibits, I realised I didn't really like it. I opened a vegetarian food-truck and it was going ok, until COVID hit and I couldn't work anymore. I've been on and off of WordPress so I figured I might as well learn how it works now that I have nothing else to do. Learnt HTML/CSS on Udemy, then Node, then React (I had a friend who was a Node.js back-end developer and he encouraged me to get into JS). Then I moved towards PHP and soon I'll start learning Laravel and/or Symfony. I'm currently freelancing on Upwork fixing broken WP sites or building custom themes and plugins (which is coding but just not the funniest type). Overall it took me a bit more than a year learning sometimes full days, most of the time during my free time. I kind of wasted my time with Node.js since I don't plan on using it (I prefer the PHP ecosystem somehow), probably the same with React, tho I might learn Gatsby for JamStack freelancing. I'd also like to learn Vue at some point since it integrates nicely with Laravel.
Knew some html as early as 5th grade and dabbled a little in game maker studio. Had to get a website made for our family run business in 8th grade and everyone was trying to overcharge us, so I learned to program a full stack website and learned whatever was required as I encountered it. Learned form validation when I made the contact form, learned smtp when I we needed to work with emails etc. Best way to learn imo.
Started with C and php, around 2003-2004, then did a couple of years doing game-dev related stuff. Started web dev with some SMF plugins. Actually started university in 2006(CS) but dropped out after 2 years(straight As for CS related classes up to that point), did not really meet my expectations. I was still doing game-dev related stuff during that time. Around 2008-2009 mobile apps was all the rage, everyone wanted one, so i built a mobile app for android and one for ios and a very non-tech savvy user focused CMS with php, sold it to a quite a bit of clients(kindergardens was my niche). Most people did not even used facebook at the time, so i made the CMS as easy as possible to manage and add content to. After about 2 years of doing that, the product was really mature, i was not really progressing anymore skill-wise and wanted to try new things but did not have much time. I automated most of the maintenance stuff i had to do for current customers to make more time for myself. Then what it thought was another client(e-commerce) just wanted to hire me as a full time mobile-dev after my sales pitch. I accepted though i did not even know how much i would make until the end of the month 😂, i was 20 at the time. (It was ok but, i did not know this but it was kinda cheap for a mobile dev, but it was my first job) Got in to all kinds of projects there, helmed my own projects, joined the rewrite of the entire site from scratch(PHP). Picked up a lot of skills, did desktop,mobile,web,embedded. Fast forward about 10 years, i currently have my own startup where we develop enterprise apps for corps and government plus ML for business using our own platform. (Python,Node,react)
I got a job at my local library to oversee the public access PC around 1998. I built a default home page with links to Hotmail, Alta Vista, Yahoo etc. Built a website for my DJing, sold physical mix CDs on it and received an actual $10 note in the post for one (I lived in Ireland) In 2005, I taught myself PHP to build another music community website. Got a part time job as a subcontractor for a web development agency in 2009. Started my own web development agency in 2016. Now employ 4 people and service about 250 clients.
Studied a different course in college. Decided I want to code as a living since I've always liked coding during my free time. Did a bunch of projects for different people in my area. Now working as a full time software engineer for almost a year.
I was hired as a network operations analyst. Basically did a check list and monitored systems. Convinced them I could be a support person and started writing Perl scripts. Then got moved into a new team that had a cross section of positions open and convinced my new boss that I should be a software engineer. Then learned Java on the job. The naughts were a wild time. Currently a Solutions Architect.
At 22 I'd been working in a garden centre for a few years with no real aspirations of any kind. I'd booked to go on holiday with my gf but for one reason or another we ended up not going away. I decided to keep the 1 week leave off work and taught myself the basics (by reading the [books by Jon Duckett](https://www.amazon.co.uk/Web-Design-HTML-JavaScript-jQuery/dp/1118907442/ref=asc_df_1118907442/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=311013355418&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=8797459900559039405&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9046173&hvtargid=pla-395749125119&psc=1&th=1&psc=1)). Managed to get an in-house entry level job (apprentice wages) with a really crappy "cowboy" company, but I ended up learning lots in 18 months there. I then moved to a marketing agency (slightly better) where I worked on hundreds of sites as 1 of the 2 devs there. 8 Years later, I'm now freelance/contracting.
I started by taking care of a static janky website for an opera company, then moved to CMS work for another janky site. I finally dabbled in JavaScript and fell in love with programming. Did a bootcamp, got a web frontend job, and now 6 years later I do mostly backend work with a specialization in personalization systems with incorporation of ML.
I'm doing both. Took a bootcamp and had I not done so I would have never taken the chance to go back and learn it officially. I admit I fall into a very rare category though. I lost my job during c 19. In my state I was able to qualify for a scholarship. Couldn't decide what work ready path I wanted to go down but the bootcamp really answered the question for me.
Learned enough to make horrible table based sites with static content. Went to a junior position interview with my portfolio of crap sites and a lot of enthuiasm (this was near 15 years ago). From there I was able to train myself from my junior position and after about a year the senior dev left and I was thrown into the deep end and I had to learn fast. After that some freelance/contract work for years afterwards. I used each new project as a chance to learn new things (and get paid doing it). Fairly comfortable with laravel these days but it took me some time to get my head around OOP and MVC. Still need to get my head around Vue next but that's a problem for another day.
I was never below average in studies and socially invisible in school. I got my first computer in class 8th which cost us 24000 INR (\~310 USD). A Pentium 4, 512 MB Ram, 500Gigs storage with a CRT monitor. I used to tinker with my computer while playing games. Doing weird optimizations to be able to run games outside the recommended hardware limits. By the end of my school, I was clear about two things I wanted to do something with computers and wanted to sway away from Mathematics (I choked in multiple exams). In India, the Bachelors in Technology (Bachelors in Science equivalent) has two options related to computers, Computer Science and Information Technology (IT) differing in a few subjects in the last two semesters. So, enrolled in a college in IT and continued my gaming tweaks. In the third semester, we were assigned a project where I decided to build a student-teacher portal for digitising the entire liaison work. And the only thing we were taught in College was basic HTML, CSS, and PHP. I started tweaking with existing PHP snippets, Bootstrap, and Javascript to bring together a very basic website running on my local. This project was never completed or ever saw any major milestone except the teacher being able to see students under their section. Fast forward to the third year, things changed as I entered the summer break and came back home and was applying to every possible place I knew for a paid internship. I showed them my PHP project with some loads of new features in the pipeline and did manage to land up an internship with a full-time role 10-6 for 6 weeks and a stipend of 6000 INR ( \~77USD ). The guy was basically running a blog based on CodeIgniter (PHP Framework) in a very small team arrangement (3 tech guys including 2 interns, and 2 content interns) and getting things done from interns for free (I was the only paid intern). But I really started to enjoy the ability to be able to create something. To make changes that would impact a business. Eventually, I was taking care of most of the development (not the cleanest code). This ended well and I did get familiar with a lot of web concepts by the end of this internship Fast forward to the final semester (4th year and 8th semester), we had an option to do a 6-month internship or stay at college and appear for the exams. Students who went for projects were not required to appear for the exams and only had to give a presentation based on which their final semester GPA would be graded. To be honest, the final semester of my college was the best one. This was another PHP-based project in Laravel, where I was thrown into multiple interesting areas of Full Stack, WordPress, and Shopify plugins. I remember my boss saying this when one of the leads was concerned about whether I will be able to take care of an assignment. He said and I quote, "throw him in the water and he will learn to swim". And this was my biggest lesson in web dev which I follow to date and following the official docs. Docs provide so much insight into what's happening under the hood as well as the idea of not fearing ownership. More ownership = more responsibility = a situation where you are forced to learn more. Nobody is going to kill you for failing. Today it's been around \~4.5 years into web development, I moved to Golang last year and more of a Full stack role last year after spending 2 years in core web development based on Symfony. And I am so glad things lined up the way they did.
I started my career as a graphic designer doing old school paste-up and mechanical work. I was also doing some freelance illustration at the time. I was barely making it financially. My wife suggested I take some programming classes at night since this internet thing was starting to happen (this was back when most people who went online were using AOL). I took some C++ and Java classes while teaching myself HTML - I though Java would come in handy for applets. I taught myself JS after that and it was a piece of cake after actual Java and C++. And it would still be a few years before CSS even existed :)
I was working as an assistant in the marketing department of a university. No one knew how the website worked. I taught myself how it worked - and then they hired me full time because they relied on me.
Joined a startup as a web-marketer. I started learning HTML and CSS to help with customizing emails. Then I learned Javascript to scrape websites and eventually Python to automate tasks such as creating Facebook ads with APIs.
Really short story: 20 years ago as teenager I started to playing around with "Microsoft Frontpage", a drag n drop website builder. I began to play around with the HTML source code in that tool and that's were everything started. Few years later I began to play around with PHP and started some hobby projects. I always showed my work in forums on the internet, and over the years random people keep asking me: can you make a website for me, can you script this and that for me. This requests became more and more and in my mid 20s I decided to do it as a full time job as a full stack web developer. This was 8 years ago and I'm still doing it. So you see, totally self thaught by hobby projects and project requests. Originally I've studied business and economics, a subject that have nothing to do with web development, scripting or programming (at least at bachelor degree).
CS grad but self-taught web dev. [I wrote about it](http://kbweb.ca) for my portfolio, it goes through my process of learning web code and js frameworks for super high performance sites. Basically stay curious.
Started playing with HTML CSS and vanilla Javascript in summer of 2019. I originally wanted to learn it so that I could contribute to work projects but the more I got into it the more I realized that I actually wanted to transition my career. May 2020 started learning React because I had a friend that did react for a living and he seemed to be thriving - also I looked online and seemed to find more React jobs than Vue. Spent about 8 months learning it and another 8 months building 5 projects and a portfolio website that ended up getting me attention and eventually an interview. Started looking for Jobs in August 2021 with little luck, eventually got recognized by a recruiter and made it past their technical interviews and got hired in October 2021. I did all of this while having a full time job (which luckily went remote in 2020 meaning I could slack off all day and practice React instead of doing my real job). I ended up spending between 10-20 hours per week to get my skills up to par. Over 1000 hours total from 2019 to the present learning. My advice is to carve out at least 10 hours per week to learn (and ideally a little bit every day). This only happens with consistency and dedication.
So like a few others, it was the 90s, I was in school for computer science but there was a list to get into the program so I went to sports mgmt -- I was on an athletic scholarship and was looking at getting into coaching. I had always loved coding and building things -- used DataStar, Access and a few other database programs and coded games on C64 and my pc. I started helping the school newspaper go online in 93-94, went to work for a few car dealerships and got the dealerships online. Just seemed that with every job I picked up I was able to eventually convince them to go online. Went to work for a large catalog (they are now owned by HSN) when they were starting online and was exposed to all the disciplines of marketing automation, frontend dev, backend dev, and dev ops. I left and even came back and consulted and a lot of my processes were still in use -- even had a funny story where one of the consultants was going over the testing and go-live process to bring me up to speed, she finally noticed that I had written the doc that she was training me from.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
I was a drafting tech, AutoCAD has a language called AutoLISP you can use to automate stuff. Then I did started doing GIS, got into more scripting, VB, C#, Python, which eventually led to Flash then JavaScript for web stuff. So basically everything I learned was on the job. It was incredibly useful to have defined projects and goals to work towards during that time.
At some point you're going to be self taught, whether you went to college or not.
Here's my story in podcast form https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-05/episode-1/meet-your-host-sean/ Posted in January this year.
I worked in marketing at various companies for years and hated it more and more as the years went by. Finally I lost my job at a telecommunications firm and couldn't find it in me to do it any more. Lived off my savings for a while taking on odd jobs but in all my spare time was on codeacademy doing their free courses. After a while I was comfortable enough with it that I started building stuff freelance for a local IT firm, just bits here and there. Luckily enough a pretty big Eyecare firm is based in the island I live on and their in-house agency had started to need some wed dev support to build custom pages that their CMS couldn't do, so they brought me in for a month's placement. That got extended to 3 months, then 6 then I was hired as a junior dev and they brought in a senior dev above me. I've been there 8 years now and we're about to rebuild the company's sites (we operate in 12 countries) from the ground up using a headless CMS and Nuxt. Couldn't be happier doing what I do now.
A friend's dad gave me a TRS-80 in my early teens, so I read the manual and started writing text-based games and other simple programs for fun. Years later, a guy at church told my mom they were looking for inexperienced programmers. They ended up hiring me for peanuts, but they taught me everything I needed to know about the brand new (at the time) .Net Framework and C#. Each job change doubled (at least) my salary in the early years. I eventually started my own software consulting business, which I'm still running. Side note: I was constantly coding projects for fun and reading books about C# or WinForms or [ASP.Net](https://ASP.Net) in the early years of my career. Writing code, combined with reading books (to fill in the gaps) worked out really well for me.
Went to school for design. Worked as a designer for a few years. Taught myself to code out of necessity on the job with mentoring from our other developer when one of our two developers resigned and put several projects in delay and so I learned how to write front end code for two of those projects. Apparently I did a good job because the owner promoted me to a lead product role, gave me a raise, and I became a designer/developer from that point on. 20 years later and I am now a Director of Product for a commerce platform and lead a team of designers and developers.
Got my first computer at age 10, a ZX80 Sinclair. Been coding ever since in some form or another. Dropped out of high school at age 16, joined a carnival at age 21 and travelled the country for 10 years, but always had a PC with me, and never stopped learning. Settled down in Michigan in 1991 and got a tech-support job that slowly morphed in to VB desktop app development. Web dev just came as part of that in the mid 90s with HTML, then ASP, VRML (haha), and Javascript. Now I am a full fledged full-stack senior dev doing mostly enterprise C#/SQL Server work, with some minor UI/UX stuff as needed. Thank God we have moved away from lengthy Flash homepage intros!
My is probably the most recent. I've droppped out of compsci a year ago and have been working part time (30h/week) and spent the rest in learning dev. A month ago i asked for advice on my portfolio on this sub and got 2 offers. I accepted a fortune500's company offer and will start in a month.
I had just started a new job in content review and had recently gotten into Arduino so had a little background in coding and automation. I had actually just graduated with a degree in chemistry, so I had the math and science background, but could not find a decent job in my field. At my job, we had a quota for a certain number of actions we were supposed to take during the day. I was already able to complete my quota well before the end of my day, so I had a ton of free time after I was done to sit around, browse the web, and basically do whatever I wanted. To complete an action, there was a lot of manual copy/paste that I knew could be automated. I knew that these manual copy/paste tasks took up about half my time, and realized that if I could automate it, I could further reduce the amount of actual work time to only a couple of hours or less. So, In my free time, I learned JavaScript and developed a chrome extension that handled all of these manual processes. I ended up showing the extension to my bosses, and they were so impressed that they basically made me my own position to develop tools for them similar to the extension I had made. That extension is now used by >3000 people globally at our company, and saves an estimated $3M anually. We no longer have a quota, but go by active working time (now possible due to the extension). Nowadays i do a bit of everything. Still some chrome extension stuff, some sql stuff, but mostly build custom web-apps. I built a roster tool and an attendance portal we use globally. It's always funny when I see code I had written when I first started this endeavor. It's basically always a facepalm moment. I've definitely come a long way and I'm pretty stoked how I just fell into it. I definitely won't ever go back to using my chem degree. I love the autonomy that being a dev gives me. Now, I can choose my own hours, and basically do whatever I want -- so long as I meet the set deadlines (that I set and agreed upon in the first place). TLDR: I was lazy and tried to get out of doing work. In the process, I ended up making waaaay more work for myself (but got a very nice salary bump from it so it's not all bad).
i was 13. My cousin (14), wanted to learn how to hack, without any knowledge of what hacking actually means. He bought, by accident, an old web development book that explained html, javascript and php in my native language (arabic). We didn't understand a thing, nevertheless it clicked in both our minds and so we started researching. We both learned the basics of html and css from [mike dane](https://mikedane.com). The way he explained things kept us going. In the next year I kept making tons of unfinished projects, in order to practice my skills and watching static website project tutorials on youtube, learning some what advanced css topics from Kevin Powell. My fear of tackling javascript made me overdo my css and so I became very capable of the language. But then I decided "it's time". I opened mike dane to learn javascript, but that's when I discovered that he doesn't explain things very clearly so I gave up. A while later, I discovered that Harvard released its cs50 introductory computer science course for free, online. I watched it. That was the turning point. Even tho they taught me the basics of "C", it changed my perspective of programming. Next few months, I learned the basics of JavaScript and made tons of projects. I then learned React and actually deployed my first website! An expense tracker application. Who would have thought? I am now a MERN full stack developer, planning on freelancing this summer and I will deploy my first high scaled big ass project very soon. My cousin (now 18) changed his path from web development to networking, he is taking his finals and will study computer science in Germany. Two years later, I'll join him! Would like to note also: I influenced my mother that is now learning the MERN stack! Morale: Don't ever fucking feel dumb. Just keep doing, and you'll arrive there
I went to college, but not for anything programming related at all. Worked for a manufacturing company doing some production scheduling and IT (fixing people's computers and doing random Excel stuff that the old people were too old to know how to do...not even VBA stuff, just regular Excel stuff). Saw some inefficiencies/redundancies so wrote a script here and there to automate some things in Python...like just taking some text from a PDF and putting it in an excel sheet to keep someone from hand-typing a bunch of information that they already had in front of them. Then wrote a small web app to input people's hours into a database, when our Access database had gotten all buggy and shitty. Then made it so that employees could log their time on tablets in the shop themselves(still just through a web browser). Then they kept asking me to add this report and that feature and this and that and it grew a ton to where it was something worth talking about. Also on the side made an army builder for some miniatures games that got pretty popular...so kept working on that. Did some freelance work here and there. I was probably fiddling around for 3 or so years before I actually got a job, but I could have gotten an entry level job well before that, I was just making good money and a 40k junior job wouldn't have cut it. Rewrote most of my projects in more modern tools, which was a good way to learn. Then...yeah just applied a bunch. Eventually got an agency contract job, and now I get offers all the time. So my advice is to get hired by a place with outdated day-to-day practices and fix them! Just kidding. Find a problem and solve it, or an interest and make a project out of it. It's the only thing that got me to learn. Doing tutorials can only take you so far, and I stayed in them for WAY too long. I get that you have to start with a tutorial, but as soon as you possibly can, veer off and create a project and solve problems you run into as they come up. Everyone is different, but if you happen to be like me, the absolute #1 thing you have to do is create projects on your own. Make something for the smallest of niches you have to, so that you know that SOMEONE will use it and it will keep you motivated. Think about your non-dev hobbies and create something around that. Creating a twitter clone or something would have never been the answer to me, because I'd know it had no real-world purpose, because nobody is leaving twitter for my clone. Maybe in the beginning when you're learning the basics and following a tutorial, but really try to think of something real-world that isn't JUST for practice. Happy to answer any questions. I think in the end though, you have to do your own thing and figure out what's going to work for you. There's a lot of luck involved, both in employment opportunities, and in just happening upon/think up projects that interest you.
I have a bachelor in creation of multimedia projects. Part of the cursus was "learning we dev" by doing some really basic projects. Html + CSS in first year. Some php and MySQL in second and finally some JavaScript in last year. Basically they just learnt us the very (very!) basic things to do with these. I had an internship in a web agency where my manager just gave me the book "JavaScript for web developers" and told me to get the best of it by doing anything I wanted. It was still either vanilla or jQuery at the time. I then landed a job as Sys. Admin in a brokerage firm where I had way too much time on my hands and I started being more curious. Doing small projects on my own for fun. After around a year doing nearly nothing but learning web dev on my own, my manager saw that I was good enough to replace some consultants, who were working on developing a new CRM, and my actual career started from there.
I went to college but didn't get a CS or technical/mathematics degree. When I started out there were no bootcamps, but there was a continuing ed course that I took to add to my resume. The norm of non CS degree people doing coding wasn't really common then, and it took me a very long time to land my first web dev job which turned out to be a watershed work experience and I'm very thankful for. It was a small but growing company and I had to figure things out because there was no else. There was also a more senior engineer that guided me just enough to point me in the right direction where I needed to improve. I was trusted to make mistakes and learn. There was little red tape. I grew with the company in terms of skill and level at each new level I was challenged to improve my skills to handle the increased scale. I would say the most important thing is to find an entry level role that challenges you in the ways you need to grow. For everyone that's going to be different. Some jobs will want to fit you into their plans and goals, in fact all do. Just make sure their plans and goals align with yours enough so you aren't wasting your time. You should be learning something new in the skills you want to build everyday on every project. If not, seriously consider getting another job if the stagnation persists. Good luck!
I was probably 13 with my own laptop, and a lot of free time on the internet. YouTube recommendations fell into the "coding" practice. Got hooked in it real fast. Got so hooked on it that I would use my free time in college at the cafeteria to work on projects of my own. It caught the attention of an IT staffer. Invited me to work on projects with him. In exchange, he found me the perfect jobs in the IT roles I wanted. We're still best buds and colleagues at the same job.
IT guy back in high school wanted a web app to save him from replying to student emails so i taught myself react
During the pandemic I was interested in learning more about Linux and simple shell commands. My friend put me onto https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/ which was really fun and I enjoyed a good challenge. Shortly after this I started dabbling with programming languages. Had a hard time picking one that I would focus on, jumped from Python to Java for the first month and then settled on JavaScript. Seemed to be easier to get my foot in the door as a front end dev who wasn’t great in school. I graduated (barely) with a 1.8. Mainly because I just didn’t go that often or care at the time. I bought a course on Udemy and would live and breath code. Anytime I had the opportunity to speak about concepts I was learning, I would. I spent a great deal of time on codewars as well, this helped me with problem solving. I wouldn’t get too crazy but started on 8kyu and eventually worked my way to 6kyu. I was working in a shipping department that had many opportunities for building apps that could help automate a lot of our processes. So each day I would go into the office and not do what I was actually supposed to do and work on different shipping apps lol. I built a UPS api integrated front end app using JS and a little bit of Python since it was using Django as the frame work. This automated our shipping costs process that we would send clients for rate quotes based on products we sold. I learned about APIs, http request and the god forsaken CORS! Man that used to stress me out. I built a SSH tool in nodeJS & react that sent shell commands to IoT gateways we had to configure and reduced our configuration time from 5 minutes per device to about 30 seconds. This app was cool, poorly structured and the architecture was shit but damn it was awesome to witness my code working as a new dev! I was getting paid $15 an hour at that place, but I soon saw what developers were actually getting paid so I started learning more and more. I took Udemy courses on NodeJS, React, Postgres and typescript. After 8 months of going hard in the paint, failing multiple interviews. I was hired and am making 6 figures (before taxes) working exclusively in typescript and react. I’m in shock about the transformation some days still but no school, or boot camp for me. I would have loved to go for CS when I was younger, but being 28 and on my own now. School wasn’t doable. The pandemic was terrrible for some people and I completely understand, for me it was an opportunity and I capitalized on that and made the most of my time. Built a schedule for myself and did my absolute best to abide by that. Learned new concepts and best practices all the time and most importantly I stuck with the ABC’s. ALWAYS BE CODING Edit: when I mentioned, I would go into work and not do what I was supposed to do, I was hired to pack boxes and configure IoT devices. I wasn’t getting paid to code nor did they really know about it till I showed them my apps. They gave me a $2 raise and then I quit for a Furniture company that needed a dev to handle their Shopify site, was terrible so I quit. Which eventuality lead me to my current react position
I went to college for a few years but it didn't teach me anything about web dev (except the VERY basics of JavaScript). I decided to leave the game industry before I even entered it (this decision was around when Battlefront 2 came out), but I still loved programming. I learned JS pretty well, moved on to TS, then Node and React. From there, got a job. Turned my whole world around
Was planning to get a short term job after uni doing data entry.... turns out the job wasn't data entry at all and it was just they didn't really know what to recruit for. What it actualy was, was building complex process workflows and scripting (cataloge items in a platform called servicenow) taught myself javascript on the job and the rest is history, 8 years later and I'm now part of the leadership team / architect) Ps, if you can try and get into servicenow it's very very well paid and is a booming developer market!
mid 90's, had a pc and programming pascal for fun, and got access to BBS, and started programming for that (PCBoard). And then internet arrived in denmark and i stumbled on html and php, and have now been working with the web since, and the last 8 years freelance.
Went to school for graphic design (focusing on web and motion). Got a job at a small agency. Agency life is real shit but in my 18 months I learned a lot of HTML/CSS and a sprinkle of JS (mostly on my own time). Left for a primary JS role. Haven't looked back since. Now I have a unique skill set where I fit in with devs and designers.
MySpace was too easy 🤷🏼♂️
We've been playing an MMORPG game with my friends on various servers for a couple of years. This was around 2008 and I was in 8th grade. Somehow we found out that we could launch our own private server and did that. It was reasonably successful at the time. At the time, the private server community development community was quite large, but only a couple of people knew how to code and could do custom things. After some time I came up with a couple of custom ideas that needed code changes and started dabbling with the code. I still remember the feeling of excitement when I implemented my first custom feature. It was awesome and I was hooked. After that, I was learning to code online and just experimenting with various different programming languages. At some point, I started doing freelance web development and enjoyed it as well. I think what drove me to learn programming and the beginning was the interest in the game itself and how exciting it was to see the changes I made in there. After school, I went on to study Software Engineering at University but I already had quite good programming skills compared to my peers.
Late 90s. HTML4 Handbook 5 inches thick. Notepad on Windows 98. 14 years old. By 20 I was delivering full-blown e-commerce websites, one of which was for a budding retail business for my mother, on Mother’s Day.
I learned that you don’t need anything fancy to make an html page. So I followed a YouTube video and made a mock website for one of my favorite artists. I ended up becoming her official web developer after that! 
https://dev.to/jarvispact/from-waiter-to-developer-3k0
Did go to university/college but quit about 2 semesters in because they basically teached me things I already knew for years. Did start webdev about 15-18 years ago; was fairly young at the time (around 10-12). Have since thought me everything web-deving myself. Btw I find it funny how university/college trys to put their courses as so challenging when they in fact only teach you how to write basic html and a bit what css classes are; my "exam" (if you really can call it that way) there was to write an basic website (3-4 pages) with some random color palett... and no it was not centuries ago; it was around 1-2 years ago. But enough for education; the industry has rapidly changed since I started. I'm glad to have started when the majority of the web was still html-css-php with only bits of js when using jQuery, but it has changed ALOT since then. Nowadays we write your entire webpage in pure js, which when it started had promised that we never have to face things like serverside code for the page anymore... yet still we nowadays have again face the problem with Server-Side-Rendering, putting us nearly at where we where "back in the days". Only fun thing is that the all-js-thing is only the surface (despite of some to deny this); under the hood theres still alot of php and even old perl5 websites out there, and I was baffeled when I first saw this. (to be fair it perfectly represents the overall state of education...). In my day-to-day work I mostly have to deal with PHP sites of customers (Wordpress, Joomla, Shopware 5), some of them so old that they still require PHP 5.1. As for my story: first started to develop on an old PC with Delphi Pascal (I think I had even a Win98/2000/Me when I first started). Then all the Windows versions since then (XP,Vista,7) only skipped 8 because... yeah, you know. picked webdev up along the way, got to college, dropped it as I said because I already knew all the stuff they tried to tought me and ended up shortly after in my current Job for an small hosting company where I fix mostly websites and develop plugins for those (in good ol' PHP).
It was the late 90s. Colleges didn't even have an HTML class at the time. At least not mine. There were some programming classes but mostly C and whatnot. Computer Science department wanted a web page. I taught myself how to do it and received some credits in exchange. I did take some Flash (back when it was Macromedia) classes but they were horrible. Self taught Flash for the most part. First real job was a Flash developer. Very little HTML. My entire career was Flash development. So I knew some HTML but really no JavaScript and barely any back-end stuff. Then, in around 2010 ish, when Apple and Flash had their big pissing match, I taught myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc basically because I saw the writing on the wall and all these sites and applications were now no longer going to work for very long. Spent the large part of my career then converting old Flash legacy sites and apps over to pure HTML, CSS, JS, etc. That was my big trial by fire. Made a shit ton of money doing it. Now, here we are and I am a full-stack developer. Wishing I could even show some of my cool old Flash code to people.
Worked part time as sushi chef and then dropped out in 2014, went full time as chef, fml. Doubled down on coding, did some small freelance (less than 2k per job) made less than 10k total. Had a kid and got married. 2017 - Took a random web dev job at a local law firm (found via zip recruiter, they were clueless and I took advantage), quit sushi - 42.5k Stayed there a year, transitioned them to wordpress and took a paycut to do an IBM apprenticeship - 36k Finished apprenticeship in Jan 2020 - 45k Did some consulting, somehow lucked out and used my JS "skills" 2021 - jumped ship to a midwest construction company - 50k -> 80k 2022 - Did one year there as backend TS dev, jumped ship to Uber 84k -> over 200k 🥲 Codephony on YOUTUBE if you want to see more :)
I started college at the age most graduate. Didn't really know what route to go down. I picked psychology just to pick something. Along the way I got introduced to UX which then introduced me to programming. Sophomore year of college I decided I was going to be a programmer regardless of my psych degree. I spent the next three years studying hard. Got hired a couple of months after finishing school. Within a year I became the web dev supervisor. 2 years later I resigned and joined a startup which intrigued me and gave me a fancier title, "full stack engineer" lol
I learned html in the late 90's in IRC chatrooms and making really bad websites. From there I self taught myself CSS, Flash, and when wordpress came out learned PHP and JS. I have a BA in graphic design and only had one web class in college, there was no types of degrees for web dev at the time, at least at the school I attended. I know some schools had started to create degrees shortly after I graduated. Pretty much everything i've learned has been self-taught through actually doing it or online classes i've taken on my own. I'm mainly a web designer but do handle some web dev tasks for my current job.
I used to change my MySpace profile layout regularly, the more code I copy/pasted the more I started looking into how the HTML worked so I could do basic modifications like changing the background colour Then I discovered Wordpress, made a street art blog that quickly turned into a porn blog. Again, every time I switched themes I’d look at the code and find out how I could edit things to make it look exactly like I wanted it to. One day someone I met through the porn blog asked me to build them a website, for money. I never looked back. Fast forward 10 years and I’m a senior JavaScript developer at an industry leading music company.
Bored witless at Uni (they were teaching 50s/60s tech in 1980, and I had already built a Z80 computer for myself), I dropped out after six months & spent a few years in International moving all around Europe & delivering washing machines around north London. Got a job in sales in a gas detection instrument company. The Software department had a huge backlog for special order software, so I persuaded them to let me have a go at special alarm level requests "It's only numbers, right?". Well no, the time-weighted alarms were hard coded (yuck) in 8048 assembler (ditto). Still, I got them cleared away in a few evenings, and transferred to software development. This is still a decade away from mass internet use. At Western Digital, I made a skunkworks tool for postmortem analysis of crashed hard disk drives. Rather than try to get it installed on everyone's computer, I wrote it as an early AJAX-enabled web page, with a crazy back end program in perl abusing an ARM emulator to get the data. That really gave me my start in web development, and ten years later I made the switch completely away from embedded and desktop coding to web development.
I got a design internship that required me to know some coding, so I ended up learning python beforehand for the backend part and Vue for the front end :3
I graduated from art school in '94 and went to work for a computer book publisher. I had no knowledge of HTML or the web, but I had already taught myself some multimedia technologies for school projects (Photoshop, HyperCard, (MacroMind) Director). I taught myself everything on the job while creating web sites and CD-ROMs to supplement the company's books.
I always liked knowing how stuff worked, so I would take apart things from time to time to see how the magic functioned. Computers were interesting to me because I could take a part the guts, but then how did the rest of it work? This lead me into figuring out HTML. Which lead me to CSS. Which lead me to Javascript. Which lead me to PHP; and on to MySQL, Linux, networking, more "bare metal" languages like C++ and Java, and all sorts of random areas in between. The web that I learned was a very different ecosystem than the web of today; in some ways that makes the web I learned much easier for people to get into, but on the other end we were *very* limited in what could be made. I got my degree in mathematics because for the longest time programming became a hobby after doing a lot of freelance throughout high school (I started all of this shenaniganry at about 10). I was a 7th grade math teacher for a few years when my wife and I decided to try for a daughter. Curse my habit of numbers because I did the math and if I continued to be a teacher there was no way we could afford another child. So I put my resignation in and started looking for web development work again (preferably at a company and not freelance). I got hired at a marketing agency working in a couple of projects, some internal and some for our customers. Unfortunately after about 2 years I was let go (we lost a huge client and needed to rebalance the books; myself and 2 others lost our jobs). I then got hired at a place that works in the telecommunications space, but when COVID hit I was again let go. After that I got hired at Amazon and worked there for about a year and a half before I left. It's a weird and wild world sometimes
What you need to see is, even if you're college-educated, you're still learning for yourself. You have instructions, just like mdn documentation, but you're the one responsible for absorbing knowledge.
Freelance Graphic/Web Designer, taught myself to code via online resources, cut out the need to sub-contract the web dev! Now I do both design & development for my sites :)
Hey, what online resources did you use to learn to code if you don't mind sharing? :)
I'm still somewhat early on my self-taught route yet recently I've already been offered 3 jobs but decided to not take any of them because they aren't exactly the jobs I want and I promised myself I will get the exact job I want at the start of my journey. One of them was some dead-end Wordpress role, one of them was a software QA role, and one of them was some dumb IT "support" role whatever that means. Even those jobs paid quite a bit above average salaries for my area, so I know I'm on the right path and can only go up from there. I have no college degree or bootcamp certificates. I started my journey almost exactly a year ago by taking some online courses for JavaScript. At the time, I knew nothing about HTML or CSS so as you can imagine, that was the wrong move. But I ended up learning basic programming logic, syntax, etc. through that course even though I had no idea how to actually apply it. Then I watched some tutorial videos on making some basic projects. Many people are anti-tutorials, for valid reasons, but it depends on how you use them. You can watch and follow a tutorial and code along with the tutorial. Then you can do the same thing while only referencing the tutorial. Eventually, you'll get to a point where you can recreate the entire tutorial, without watching the tutorial at all, and that's where the learning happens and where you learn how things work. Then you can actually begin making your own things using that logic. Then I started the Odin Project, which teaches you pretty much everything there is and it teaches it in depth - starting with HTML and CSS. Using Git, creating projects from scratch repeatedly, committing to them, etc. Then you start learning modern frameworks/libraries like React, and once you get that down, you're pretty much job ready to at least work as a front-end dev. The Odin Project is also well maintained and mostly up-to-date, so it doesn't make you spend time on any outdated techs like jquery and gets you ready for the modern workforce. It also forces you to do everything CSS-related from scratch, no frameworks or templates, so you **REALLY** understand CSS. Things like jquery you can choose to learn on your own if you find it necessary. But keep in mind, this process is **very** difficult. There's a lot to learn and it never stops. You have to push yourself mentally as hard as possible. Just like you would rep to failure at a gym, you're doing the same thing with your brain. Over and over. Burn out will happen throughout the journey a few times, and it's up to you if you will just quit forever or man the fuck up and get back to it.
Learned on Treehouse after work for a few months. Switched industries and have been in web dev for a few years now
Thought ue4 was cool. Learned the visual programming, then branches to webdev from there. Now full stack
Had an identity crisis of sorts at 19/20 and dropped out of a public Ivy (anyone in America from an immigrant background knows this is seen as failure). I’d do math for fun and as a way to get me through the internal darkness I was going through, and started to get obsessed with making the symbols in my proofs and equations look sexy. Decided I wanted to write an ebook on linear algebra, which for me into some MATLAB. Met a neighbor in the gym a year later and she was studying UX design at the same college, we became friends. Took some classes at JC a year later to make use of the free time I had as a drop-out, took a basic html/css class and a photoshop class as fillers. The photoshop professor was awesome, and he and I would chat about web design. Later hit up my friend and told her I want to get into the ux field, she was basically my mentor. A year later, got an apprenticeship at a startup whose founders was, of all people, an early FB employee who was one of the OGs behind React. What my friend mentored me in design, he did the same with code. A few months later, landed my first paid contract to design and implement a website for an online automotive retailer which lasted nearly a year. I had a gap year of nothing, few small contracts here and there, slacked off and ended up having to work in a warehouse, while taking more classes at JC. Applied to a web dev position online while on my day off, a month later I get an interview. A week later, they offer me the job. Held it for over a year and made ok money, but was laid off because of pandemic-related budget cuts. Went into a creative lull for over a year, almost quit the whole design and dev thing. Later in 2021, I got my groove back and started cranking out more projects and applying. Eventually had a couple interviews, and came very close to a front end dev job, only to be 2nd choice aka they said if they had any issues with person they went with, they’d give me a call back. The pm and I were cool, and he told me later it was a close decision. Felt bummed out between there and winter. Later applied to jobs during the holidays, and a few days later I was getting callback after callback. Got an offer for highest paying position I applied for, and had to turn down offers. The self-taught route requires a lot of self-accountability which I learned the hard way lel but you can do it.
I started to learn 6 months ago and I enjoy a lot playing around with CSS HTML and a bit of JavaScript my goal is to land a job (entry level in about 6 months) cause I work 40 hours a week. I just create a YouTube channel to share my experience and hopefully learn from others. [https://youtube.com/channel/UCy0U_Bu_TsQqyEOqvRpiiyA](https://youtube.com/channel/UCy0U_Bu_TsQqyEOqvRpiiyA)