Greetings, friends! Can you guess who's here? It's Sloan, your trusty companion in the world of coding and beyond 🦥
Welcome to a fresh edition of "Sloan's Advice Corner," where we dive into your inquiries, share insights, and navigate the exciting realm of personal and professional growth. Whether you're seeking career guidance, pondering office dynamics, exploring industry trends, or honing your technical prowess, this is the place to be.
I'm thrilled to embark on another learning adventure with you, tackling your questions, comments, and musings. So, without further ado, let's jump right in!
Today, we have a question from one of our members, @woodtoyz, who is considering a career transition from C# desktop development to web development.
I need guidance on what to focus on and how deep should I go to land a web position. Employers seem to demand SO many different skills, tools, frameworks. Each part of the web puzzle is so deep! What web coding skills do I need to know before having a real chance at a junior position?
So, let's lend a helping sloth paw to our fellow coder on their web development journey. What web coding skills do you believe are essential before having a real chance at landing a junior web development position?
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Top comments (8)
Ok, unpopular opinion on a topic I care about
The skills you need to do the job, you have your whole developer life to learn them. Don't worry about knowing everything, nobody does. We all started as beginners We are all learning.
Now there is a part that developer tend to forget about because it's hard to think as a dev and to think as a marketing/sales person at the same time.
You need marketing because people needs to know that you are someone interesting, not just a dumb CV.
You need sales because like it or not, in a job interview, you are selling yourself.
Good question, thanks myself for asking
Regarding technical skills I'd say to first choose a path, backend or frontend, and then focus on getting the necessary skills for it, HTML/CSS/Javascript for frontend, or an specific programming language and database for backend, for example Nodejs, Python, PHP, and PostgreSQL, MySQL, Mongo.
Here are 2 roadmaps that maybe can help you decide which path to follow:
Frontend Roadmap
Backend Roadmap
Thanks for the reply. The list is an amazing road map. The amount of topics appear to be staggering! Is there a way to say how proficient a junior dev should be with the recommended (purple) skills?
I have built basic apps using MVC, CSS, JS, SQL SERVER and HTML.
Would smaller businesses require an extensive list of skills to build basic CRUD apps?
I'm looking for the fastest way to get a foot in the door of web development.
Thanks!
The lists are indeed staggering! So you shouldn't wait to know all of the topics on it to look for your first job as a web developer, not even all the purple ones, maybe half of them at best.
For example, when I got my first job as a wordpress web developer I knew the purple topics on the frontend road up till the CSS Preprocessors part, and I just knew the basics for some of those topics.
If you've already built basic apps with the technologies you mentioned, you might be ready to look for your first job. In the meantime you could start learning a JS framework such as React, Angular or Vue if you're interested in the frontend road, or learning Node.js and a little about a NoSQL DB such as mongo if you're more interested in the backend road.
I'm using the list as a learning guide now. At this point I have made the rounds of online coding videos and worked along side the instructor building their mini projects. Thing is, without putting it all together and continually using the concepts, it is easy to forget a lot of things. I would like to seriously apply for a jr. dev position but a lot of those require 1-2 years or "expertise"! Guess I will have to incubate and keep doing projects on the side. Perhaps look at opensource work?
It's normal that you forget about things, It's impossible to remember everything, the important thing is that you know what can be done and how to look for it.
For example, I might not remember exactly how to convert a date to a human readable format in Javascript, but I know there's away to do that so I just google it, that's a pretty basic example but I hope you get the point.
The junior market is pretty rough right now, that's true, but you can start building up experience by working on open source projects as you say, building personal projects or even taking on some freelance work.
I appreciate your taking time to respond. I hope others can benefit as well. What you said about looking things up is very true and hits home. Some of the 1 hour online videos takes me many days to get through.
My concern is being able to meet the expectations of a Jr. Dev. A scenario would be to start a position where the company uses a few concepts you learned and a bunch where you burn time struggling through. I am hoping that doing some projects will provide enough experience where new On-The-Job concepts will not be a fail point.
No problem, and yes you should keep doing projects, that's the best way to practice and get some experience.
And when you do get your first job, don't fret about not knowing something (I know, easier said than done), if you're honest about your knowledge, and a company hires you knowing you're a junior developer, they won't expect you to know everything, they'll expect you to make mistakes, I mean, try not make them, but it is normal to make them, we all do :)
I wish you the best! Good luck on finding that first opportunity!