Introduction
Hey, I’m David presently a front-end developer at Crina Studio and what we will talk about here is basically how I managed to get this job at this great company without any computer science degree that is just by studying on my own, going through a road map. First of all, let's get right what front-end developers do especially for those who think they just spend their time drawing and coloring with code. So, a front-end developer is a type of software developer who is in charge of building the user interface of a website or web application and making sure that the app or website’s user interface respects the design( if any ) with high fidelity and quality, that is the basics of his job, things get more complicated when he as to implement interactivity and functionalities which most at times have to communicate with the back-end.
Getting to the doorstep
Originally, I am a student who graduated with a bachelor's degree in project management which has nothing to do with what I'm doing right now. It was difficult for me to find a job in that domain especially due to the lack of opportunities in my country I decided to switch to learning something practical where it could be easy for me to prove I could do the job. So, in my search for what I will make a career in I found many people on social media saying great things about software development more precisely web development, and how it can make you RICH!!! what surprised me the most was how people were so passionate about it, writing code and all the like.
Later on, I took my computer a started exploring the world of coding with what was said to be the most beginner-friendly programming language python, this was so amazing, you just there sitting on your computer, and just by writing some you could build amazing stuff, i felt like I discovered magic, I have always been using a computer but never did I even think of how all those apps and websites were built. Since I wanted a job as quickly as possible I finally left Python away and moved to learning front-end development, which seemed to be the easiest way into software engineering.
Breaking into the door
My front-end developer roadmap can be summarized as such:
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how the Internet works
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HTML / CSS
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javascript & typescript
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React
building projects with these technologies helped me get some basic knowledge of how they work and how to use them. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are the building blocks of web development so it is important to get deep knowledge of how they work, this is one of the mistakes I made.
After working on some projects I then started to look for a job, I wasn’t targeting a job contract at the beginning but an internship hoping to get more practical knowledge on how things work on real-world projects.
After a few months of job hunting on Linkedin, X( former Twitter), google, and in local dev communities I finally found a job contract at Crina Studio where they were looking for a junior frontend developer. The interview was nothing crazy, just a few questions on the technologies I put on my CV and other questions related to software engineering. The objective here was to know how deep I went into learning the basics, although I say the interview was nothing crazy I still failed it and this was mainly because of how limited my knowledge of the technologies I use and software engineering in general. I went back home frustrated knowing I lost that opportunity.
Inside the room
After 2 weeks of sitting at home and keeping up with the learning, I received an email whereby the company where I failed the interview for a junior frontend role because I was worst that a junior called me for a 6 months internship with the chance of a job offer if i passed the internship period.
Now! There we go, I’m in a tech company building challenging projects, and this is completely on another level from when I was just building stuff on my own. using typescript, react, and redux seems much more difficult, having to deal with clean code, clean architecture, domain-driven design, the complexity of the business logic and all those software development concepts I didn’t know about makes development complicated. This is where I had to prove I could do the job, getting hands-on with the new concepts I had to learn and keep on improving my skills by going deeper into learning the technologies on the company stack and enlarging my knowledge of the field. This is all about keeping up with the grind and telling yourself, this is where the real game begins.
In Conclusion
Your story will surely be different from mine but the message I want to pass on here is about telling yourself you could achieve anything if you put in the work, becoming a good software engineer is not about getting a computer science degree but much more about your knowledge of the field and in the current century there are plenty of free and paid learning resources on the Internet about almost anything, all depends on you and your determination to achieve your goal.
