My Learning Journey
Tags: webdev, programming, career
Published: 2022-04-20 02:10:56

Hi there!, my name is Luciano Muñoz and I'm a developer. First of all I want to thank you for taking a few minutes to read me ❤️.

My intention with this blog is to document the learning process in my journey as a developer. I'm not starting from scratch, I have been programming for several years. I did it as a hobby for a long time, and the last few years as a freelancer, in parallel to my current full time job as IT support.
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Since a few years for this part I have set myself the goal of ***getting a job as a developer for a foreign company***. After seeing other programmers work for companies in USA, Canada or Germany, and earn salaries in dollars, I felt that was able to do it also. Not just for the possibility of working doing something that I love like programming, but also for the peace of living with a dollarized salary in an economically unstable country like Argentina, with inflation rates that seems to never stop growing.

Long story short, in early 2020 I began to study English, an essential requirement to work abroad; and parallel to my full time job as IT support I continued to carry out freelance projects for local clients in order to continue improving negotiation skills, deadlines managing, etc. In 2021, while I was still taking English classes, the goal changed, the idea of working abroad was still alive but no longer as a freelancer, but as a developer employed in a company or startup. Freelancing was definitely not for me, it requires skills that I didn’t have and that I didn’t like it. I learned a lot in those years as a freelancer and I gained experience that otherwise would have been impossible, but the reality is that all I wanted to do was programming and solve problems.

With the new goal in mind, I began applying to open Backend and Fullstack positions. It was hard to take the decision and overcome my fears, but I did it finally. The responses from the recruiters were not too long in coming, and at the end of 2021 I had my first interviews with foreign companies. To my surprise, I passed the english interviews 👌, but failed the technical interviews 🙈. All this time I had been so focused on improving my English that I had neglected programming.

These first interviews helped me to realize that in my self-taught learning I was skipping and taking many concepts for granted, about which I couldn’t give an answer when interviewers asked me. Beyond that in practice one knows how to write a Class or develop an API, it’s mandatory to be able to explain in word each of these concepts.

So it was that in this 2022 I set myself the goal of learning all those concepts that I am missing, and documenting the process in this blog.

The first step was building a learning roadmap, for which I recommend widely the site [roadmap.sh](https://roadmap.sh/) for this purpose. In particular, it helped me a lot the roadmaps for [Backend](https://roadmap.sh/backend) and [Python](https://roadmap.sh/python), the language that I use because I think it’s very powerful with a nice and clear syntax.

With the roadmap in hand, the next step was to search for study material, and in that process I found CS50, Harvard’s Introductory Computer Science course, which I thought was a good starting point for the variety of topics it includes, such as _algorithms_, _data structures_, _memory management_, _C_, _Python_, _Javascript_, _SQL_, among others. [David J. Malan](https://twitter.com/davidjmalan) is a great instructor, didactic and very clear when teaching.
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So, this will be my starting point.
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If someone feels an interest in the course, it’s totally free in the [edX](https://learning.edx.org/course/course-v1:HarvardX+CS50+X/home) platform.
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See you soon!
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Thanks for reading. If you are interested in knowing more about me you can give me a follow or contact me at [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/luciano.webdev/), [Twitter](https://twitter.com/luciano_dev) or [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/luciano-mu%C3%B1oz/).