My Strategy and Roadmap to Become a Full-Stack Developer
Have you ever desired to acquire a superpower?
Well, learning how to code, to me, is like learning a superpower, to be honest. I'm amazed at what devs can do and how they are able to create something out of lines of code.
As I look into the future, I can't imagine that learning how to program and design interface on top of blockchain won't be a valuable skill in 5 to 10 years. It feels exactly like 95's when the internet was just starting to be used.
My Roadmap
One thing I've learned in my 20's is that I should organize my learning into a sequence that makes sense. My goal is that my roadmap allows me to see the results of what I am learning as fast as possible to keep my motivation juice flowing. Lucky for me, a good roadmap is provided in the course that I bought on UDEMY.
I already had HTML and CSS down from my years working with Wordpress. But even so, I decided to start from the ground-up and not skip the modules just in case I would miss an important concept.
So I went to Udemy and picked the top class for complete beginners:
Lectures: 349
Video: 43 hours
Skill level: All Levels
Technology covered:
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Bootstrap, SemanticUI, DOM Manipulation, jQuery, Unix(Command Line) Commands, NodeJS, NPM, ExpressJS, REST, MongoDB, Database Associations, Authentication, PassportJS, Authorization
That course only cost me $15CAD on Udemy. As you can see this is pretty extensive and I'm already at about 20% of the course.
My Strategy for Learning Fast
- Go through the Bootcamp roadmap
- Take a break between each module to apply what I've just learned so that it sticks
- Practice everyday
Then once those 43hours of classes are done. It's time to get serious and make sure that I've incorporated what I've learned so far. I will come up with a series of complex projects that I will have to implement from scratch.
Once I feel "kind of" comfortable with raw javascript, I'll choose a few frameworks and dive deeper into Node.JS to build apps on top of STEEM. They will be basic projects at first and hopefully, by next year, I would be able to start working on something more complex.
Conclusion
One should never stop learning ways to add value to other people. Udemy offers a really cheap way for people around the world to become better at anything you decide to put your mind to. All you have to do is have a burning desire, faith, an organized plan and specialized skills.
Photo by Sai Kiran Anagani on Unsplash
I think your first mistake along your way is to believe you can learn it fast. It's only half your fault though. There are countless bootcamps or self-proclaimed coding universities on the internet that promise young, sometimes motivated people that they can learn XY skills and get hired for 100k$ a year without knowing jackshit before entering.
You wouldn't expect someone to become a lawyer, or a med doctor in a few months right? I think the same applies here. If you want to learn, it will take time, and you should start with strong basics (math & logic) and then learn lower level stuff first, instead of jumping straight into NodeJS and npm modules.
One thing to keep in mind though, is that some people have certain capacities for learning things easy. If that's your case then probably you don't even need all these courses, probably just practise, a lot of gooogling and determination should be enough for you.
I'm the "fast learning" type and I'm quite obsessive when I get into something. One year to learn how to do very basic steem interface (like steemnow for example) is too much too fast in your opinion?
How are your basics? If you are a logical person with quick learning capacities, you can jump straight into it. Just don't forget to spend some time to understand the coding concepts/patterns you will discover through working hard, wikipedia is good help usually. You can also get good at basics by doing the first easiest challenges at projecteuler.net
You will probably do a lot of things wrong and end up with spaghetti code on your first projects but each time you 'reset' to a new project your quality should improve.
I also use JS a lot these days but you shouldn't think you will be JS dev you whole life, things are always changing quick, and depending on what you want to build, sometimes javascript is not a good tech choice.
Doing something like steemnow is definatly doable in less time than that, even for a junior dev. It's all client side connected to a steem node it's pretty elegant and KISS.
Steemnow should be douable for beginner Javascript/HTML (a.k.a frontend-devs) programmers. Steemit provides a API to do REST calls. Which essentially takes care of all the block-chain tech.
Totally agree. Spending 20 hours a week, I became front-end proficient in three months, back-end proficient in six months, and developing non-trivial projects in nine months. You don’t need to know depth-first search algorithms to make a basic web app.
Yep especially with the amount of developer tools available today
Great strategy...For me JavaScript is probably the only language you need to know to become a full-stack (MEAN Stack). You can use it both for client-side and server side programming.
According to multiple study (like this), JavaScript is one of the most popular programming language. For client-side programming, JS has no competition at all. Why not learn Full Stack with JS itself ?
Python, Java and Ruby are other popular languages which are widely used for server-side programming.
That's pretty much my goal. Dive heavy on JS.
You are well done man! I appreciate this side of the character of man. You sould also try with evanto market.
I'm a computer engineering student. I also noticed the advantages of UDEMY. And I have membership. They have very useful subject expressions. I did not regret the video sets I bought. Very effective in coding.
@cryptoctopus
at age 31, this is a much better option than going back for 4 years in school.
I am 22 years old and it is a very effective resource for me besides my school lessons. Effective for everyone. I never thought I'd recommend it. Good idea. Congratulations.
But for me the only trouble is the price of the courses is a bit expensive. I have difficulty getting it
@cryptoctopus
you mean $14? Here is a 3% upvote. That should pay for it.
"Assembly Language Adventures: Complete Course"
Between my plans, I had to take it in the near future. I guess that was a nice surprise for me. Thank you so much. I guess today is my lucky day :) @cryptoctopus
It is so crazy just how easy Steem allows anybody to help someone else out without even taking money out of their own account. Fantastic deed.
"at age 31, this is a much better option than going back for 4 years in school"; lol I completely agree with that statement.
Also everything always seems hard at first but with pure determination I believe we can learn and understand anything.
Honestly, if I could ever make Steemit a full time job, this is the first thing I'd work on as part of my daily Steemit activities as well as digging through the data bases to see what trends and information I could find to help the Steemit community and the communities I'm a part of.
First of all Its great to set goals and have roadmap to make it happen, but in your plan there is some flaws. First of all Udemy gives only some basic thing like 2+2 and 2*2 , yes you learn something but just some ropes. Second problem is your roadmap availeble right now for basic things, after you finish this course you need to build some project and work on your skills again and again, so every 1-2 months you need to update your roadmap from scratch and it will be hard to be satill motivated. For me its hardest part then you learned basic things, and made some first projects to keep going and increase difficulty, I hope you will keep doing and we will see some your programming diary in steem, but for now this your roadmap is just first baby steps. It will be interesting to follow your blog
As a teenager I found coding quite fascinating and really wanted to learn but before I learned coding, I learned the harsh truth that not everyone has the talent for everything!! And apparently coding was on the NOT list for me and I just somehow scratched a pass in mt IT course!!
I wish you all the best though!!
I completely agree with you in your desire to improve your level in this area and although I myself do not understand very much about these technologies, I am still confident that in the future we will all have to improve and train for better orinting in these fields! Thank you @cryptoctopus
Wow this is nice, I am also amazed what devs can do, but also what devs accomplish on steemit.. I don't think as a functional IT guy I have th skills to learn it.. but it must feel magical to build something what didn't exist before..
@cryptoctopus,
I also a developer in real life! Unfortunately I am a Java, C# software developer, so I am little bit weak at php coding. But one of my good friend is a php and mobile app developer! I talked to him few days back and actually I am planning to build a community app on STEEM blockchain! So he said NodeJS, this is the thing that we want to learn! I feel the same and started my process to learn NodeJS and STEEM blockchain! When SMT hits, I want to start something on it! So I think you should focus more on NodeJS too!
Cheers~
Good job!
courses are not enough and not much good for learning development.
I suggest to read some books too! PDF versions are good too.
also, you should practice every day, every hour and every second!
and expect many headache!
for a good developer, learning codes are not enough. you will need some strategies for building projects.
all I can say is: Good luck @cryptoctopus
Ty my friend. I was actually looking for a good place for begginers. Always wanted to learn a bit about coding, but no Idea where to start.