In 2019, an old friend of mine on Facebook made a post about how proud he was for starting a community online where he helped a handful of people (~7 during that time) switch careers and changed their lives. He made a big impact through Reddit threads as well as his own Discord. It was through his expertise in Software Development where he helped many people from all over the world find their careers in tech. It was so inspiring to read about.

I responded to this post on Facebook:

My passion has always been within working with and on computers. I’ve always been the IT person for a lot of friends and family despite not having a college degree in CS. I do feel like I am putting myself in the same exact path as many of the self-taught developers out there you always read and hear about. All of our paths may be different, but a lot of our starting points are identical.

In all of the research I did, I saw and started to believe it to be a gateway into something I could potentially do for a living, have proper income and make it something I could do for the rest of my life. He had what was called the ‘better developer’ blog site he made himself. There I found a ton of resources to get started before leaving my 12+ year career after burning myself out from that industry in 2020.

With my friend’s help and those resources, I started learning basic python right away through a YouTube video by Mosh using Sublime Text followed by immediately learning about version control. My friend could not stress enough about learning Git. I then took the legendary Colt Steele’s web development boot camp course on Udemy that taught the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JQuery. I made a bunch of easy projects such as to-do lists and basic web pages all of which I was able to already upload onto GitHub.

I then started to struggle when learning Restful API in following along building a blog style site similar to what you would see on AirBnB. It was the first time I started to really doubt my abilities as a developer. I took a step back and reached back out to my friend who was very against diving into learning about MongoDB and other things I was looking to learn about. He being the seasoned backend software engineer who went to University for years had a much better roadmap and really wanted me to dive straight into more advanced technologies, which was way too overwhelming for me.

I continued to stick to the basic stuff and learned more about Javascript. Getting familiar with the DOM and manipulating it. After taking a step back, I took a leap forward in learning about my first JavaScript framework, React. I took the Zero to Mastery course also on Udemy by Andrei Neagoie and that was where I started taking what I have learned and turning it into a React project. I built a single page portfolio website, experimented with so many different components, NPMs and CSS tricks. Then used GitHub pages to help deploy it. Then I took an even further step and bought a domain name off of namecheap, (erikmoxley.me at the time) attached it using Netlify giving it continuous development and an HTTPS extension.

To this day, I still use these same deployment methods, but when I was constantly stuck on a big problem I could not figure out for hours, I always took a break. My last big break I took after sending out 30-40 job applications for a developer position. I almost received an offer for an internship which I thought would have been a great entry point, but they chose another candidate instead. I did receive an offer on LinkedIn to help an engineer with his startup, but I felt so intimidated and did not respond. When I did not get a response from the rest of the applications, I gave up everything entirely for a bit, but continued to dabble within the communities, looking at Twitter, YouTube and other social platforms.

One day after hearing so many stories, specifically this video by Chao Codes:

I decided to invest a lot of time watching and learning about how to network and how to build a brand around yourself that will get your name out there on social media. It seemed to be a go-to way recently for a lot of people in landing their first development job especially if they were learning the craft in unconventional ways. I followed more and more people with similar stories I found on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and now I am on Polywork.

Nowadays, I've been programming 5-6 days a week. Sometimes for an hour, sometimes for 10 hours depending on the day or project. I have built my blog using a framework called NextJS and have been using an HTML5 template for my portfolio for now. I plan on building a new one using React and making it really stand out. These two projects are a fresh new start for me as I have a much better direction and path planned for myself.

I have kept my old repositories on GitHub to refer back to them if needed, but going forward, I will focus on being consistent, making more posts on social media to hold myself accountable, and finishing my projects so that I could add them to my portfolio. I want to work on APIs using PokeAPI and one with a fantasy sports API. I think these will be solid projects and they will help me be much more prepared for when I send out applications. It will also help me be confident in showing my newly created network the work as well.

Lastly, going back to brand building, I have noticed recently more self-taught developers landing jobs where their online presence and documented journeys were key things that helped them get noticed by the employers who interviewed and eventually hired them. I think utilizing this blog as well as Hashnode will help me document my progress. I wish I had done this sooner, but I can make posts like this one to help reflect back at where I started 2 years ago compared to where I am current day.

Documenting all of the success and struggles along the way will benefit me in becoming a web and software developer in the near future. As of now, I know I will need to sharpen up my frameworks I know so far as well as vanilla JavaScript. I look to stick within the MERN tech stack, but I would really love to create something with a solid API as well. I have no real design background either so I really have to showcase how everything works in the code more so than how it looks on the browsers. Being consistent and just keep moving on forward no matter what I really believe are key in pulling this whole thing off as a self-taught developer. The field is in demand and a lot of people will tell you that.