Choosing a learning path
Published: 2021-02-07 19:05:02

When you step into the tech world, you can be lost in a sea of information, tutorials, options & boot camps. Choosing the right learning path & specific languages/tools might be quite challenging. 



Of course, there is no right or wrong method. One path may not work for everyone. Each one may find a different teaching method effective but wanted to share my journey, that seems to have worked for me. Here are the steps I followed :



1. To begin with, before deciding to pursue a tech career, I spoke to people already in the field. We discussed what they do everyday, the things they like & dislike about programming, the skills they believe are required for the same. This helped me figure out if I was really a good fit.



2. I looked up videos or tracked some contacts of people who transitioned into tech from other unrelated fields. Searching "becoming a self taught developer" on YouTube gives you a whole bunch of inspiring videos. One thing this prepared me for was the heads-up that it wasn't going to be easy. Takes a lot of dedication & motivation for someone coming from a non-tech background to pick up coding from scratch.



3. I narrowed down the role I was interested in, language I wanted to learn & path for the same. Again, it is best to discuss this with someone in the field already, as 5 minutes spent talking to them could probably save days of research. There is of course lots of information regarding this online as well. I personally, loved design & seeing my code come to life. Hence i picked web development.



4. Now to just get started. I looked at different tutorials on YouTube on everything i need to learn to get a job as a web developer. It obviously listed out HTML, CSS, JS as the basics, and other frameworks & tools. So I made a checklist with an estimated timeline to learn & discussed this with few friends so they could keep a check on my progress.



5. I started learning HTML, CSS etc from Brad Traversy's YouTube channel. He has an amazing 'crash course for beginners' series for each of these topics. I cannot stress enough on how important it was, to practise as I was learning. 



6. However, once I reached JavaScript, his crash course seemed rushed through. So I decided to go ahead & buy his course on Udemy called 'Modern Javascript from the beginning'.  It was going fairly well until i reached the advanced topics. I found them very hard to grasp as I didn't really have enough practise with the basics. I almost wanted to give up at this point.



7. I decided to give a different course a shot  & decided to buy Jonas Schmedtmann's Udemy course 'The complete JavaScript course 2020'. I found this course comparatively beginner friendly.  Upon completing this, I decided to learn React as upon checking LinkedIn, i realised most front-end jobs had this on their requirement list & there was a lot of documentation available for the same.



8. I took the 'React front to back' by Brad Traversy but found it very hard to follow. I decided to jump to YouTube to learn some basics before starting the full fledged course. Egghead.io also has a great beginner React tutorial. Soon enough, I was in a position to follow the Udemy course.



9. I picked up other tools like Git/Github, Figma, Sanity etc which would either help me land a job or work on my portfolio site. Most of these have beginner tutorials on YouTube & I decided to only learn the basics to understand how they could be used.



10. I started preparing for interviews by solving some LEET code/ Hacker rank problems & watching interview experience videos & problems. On the side, i started doing some sample websites or freelance sites to get real world experience.



10. Created a responsive website that would be my portfolio, added all the projects i built while learning as well as skills acquired in the process. I made sure to use github for version control and uploaded all my projects on the same. 



12. I joined Meetup groups, slack channels & updated my LinkedIn profile to put myself out there. Soon, I will start applying to jobs and companies I find interesting & hope to land that dream job.

Update: I found that dream job and got offered a position at Banxware!! Cannot wait to start working.