Becoming a full stack developer - Part 0: Decision, plan, routines
Tags: beginners, startup, career
Published: 2019-11-25 14:29:34

### tl;dr
I want to get hired at [colabel](https://colabel.com/) as a software developer within 6 months. This series is to document my progress over time, and if you want, feel free to follow along!

### The decision
The plan has been made: I have decided to switch careers from being a manager at a global logistics company to becoming a full stack developer. I am making the attempt to get hired at [colabel](https://colabel.com/), founded by the two fellows [@thilohuellmann](https://twitter.com/thilohuellmann) and [@gerokeil](https://twitter.com/gerokeil). These guys are fantastic and I just love the product they are building. They can afford to set a very high bar for new hires, meaning that not only do I need to buckle up but I will be working with _really_ good software developers - if I can make it on the team.

### The plan
#### What?
I want to become really good at web development with all bells and whistles and machine learning. Hence, there are a few things that I want to be comfortable with. Here is a not-yet-complete list:

Full stack (web) development
- Databases
- Building APIs
- Docker & Kubernetes
- Deployment
- Make it look ok with React & Material

Machine learning
- Bleeding edge of research (computer vision and NLP)
- Keras & Tensorflow
- Cloud deployment

#### How?
Full stack (web) development:
- Udacity Nanodegree
- Own projects, such as [my website](http://ajascha.com) (please don't run any SQL injections yet 🤫)
- Free Code Camp

Machine Learning:
- Unpaid internship at colabel
- Read 1 research paper per day
- Kaggle

Also, since I have been sleeping under a rock for most of my life, I also want to become more active on _selected_ social sites. Just recently I started using my dusty-since-creation Twitter account [@_ajascha](https://twitter.com/_ajascha) (the first two weeks have been surprisingly informative!) and I found this fabulous community here.

... and most importantly: routines! More to that in a future post, but it all comes down to (spoiler alert) [Four disciplines of Execution](https://amzn.to/2Dfw3Gd).

#### When?
[Planning is guessing](https://m.signalvnoise.com/planning-is-guessing/) but by the end of May, I want to be fully employed - that leaves me with 6 months and 5 days. That timeline is ambitious but with more time I would simply procrastinate more. When I read Austin Tackaberry's great [article on "0 to job in 9 months"](https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-i-went-from-newbie-to-software-engineer-in-9-months-while-working-full-time-460bd8485847/), I thought that my plan must be doable. Plus, with fast-growing startups the opportunity window does not necessarily become bigger over time.

### Disclaimer: I am not starting from zero
... but neither are you if you are already on DEV. I have a business degree and no formal technical education. My first _Hello, world_ goes back about three years and I have been treating programming as a hobby for most of it. I am able to build websites with Django and [Bulma](https://bulma.io/) (I love it!), deploy them and recently got into building (working) machine learning models. But to put things in perspective: Whenever I see HTML, CSS _and_ JavaScript as a prerequisite for something, my mind takes a quick vacation. But that of course should change now in a hurry!

### Why DEV?
I want to give back to the community of developers that has made all this possible. Not too long ago, I used to think of software development as an entirely frustrating experience for regular people like I am. But thanks to countless people who are devoting their time to build fabulous things, those days are over.

Perhaps Medium would have been the natural habitat for this. However, I think that such articles should be free to read. I used to be a fan of Medium but now I think they are exploiting their market dominance too much, hence the party venue has changed to DEV!

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To finish things off, a note to self: [Now get back out there and code!](https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-i-went-from-newbie-to-software-engineer-in-9-months-while-working-full-time-460bd8485847/)