From Lawyer to Web Developer

Why don’t you do a favor to your “future self” and start facing your problem today, instead of tomorrow?

That’s what I told myself in 2017, after spending months wasting time, not knowing if I should change career path or if so, where to start. Then, I imagined myself in a year from that moment. I saw myself having the same dull work life. And I panicked. But that’s not the only thing that happened. I also realized that the moment to change was NOW. And I got down to work.

A simplified concept of what the Japanese have discovered much earlier than me, called Ikigai.

When I did this mental analysis, a big question automatically came to my mind: was all this really possible? And if it was, why so many people around me that were sick of their jobs hadn’t already discovered it and started working on that? Very simple, because:

a) Most people complain, but then do nothing to change, because changing usually means work and pain.

b) Few people are interested in programming. Partially, because everybody likes different things, but I also believe that it due to a set of clichés that still surround the IT world.

In summary:

•  waste time on not important stuff
•  not doing enough research to select good courses
•  be impatient
•  not knowing exactly what to study
•  take notes the traditional way

I admit it, I am an impatient person. Programming has helped me to smooth that flaw, but that caused me some problems at the beginning. I did enough research to know that I could learn to code without getting a computer engineering degree, yes. In fact, I was hooked on the idea of being able to learn to code in a relatively short time, compared to the approximate 5 years it takes to obtain a college degree.

I found out that many people had learned to code on their own, self-taught. That was music to my ears, because the last thing I needed, with a full-time job, was to enroll in a course with rigid schedules impossible to balance with my circumstances.

Yes, I discovered that there were online bootcamps, but the disadvantages were more than the benefits. Specifically, there was only one drawback that beat all the benefits: the price. I had already decided that I should study online, but the prices of bootcamps seemed too high to me.

In contrast, I discovered sites like Udemy, where courses had two zeros less than a bootcamp. And it won me over. I discovered Udemy in November of 2017, and when I first saw it, they had many courses on sale due to Black Friday. So, I fell for it and bought like 5 courses. It was not a large amount, for less than € 50 I had them.

Then I realized that Udemy launches several offers a year (like this one), so, there was no need to buy those 5 courses at once , I just bought them for the "urgency" that the offer ran out. Nice little marketing trick, but hey, for the price I paid, it didn't hurt. I bought all kind of courses, not just about code, because, you know "just in case". Just in case what? I don't know, they were very cheap and consumerism won the battle .

So here is one of my mistakes: buying too many courses at once. And for what? Realistically, you will only be able to do one course at a time, because

multi-coursing is not a good idea for your productivity.

But, by far, my biggest mistake was not researching what was the best web development course out there. My first idea was to take a course in Spanish, because, being such a new topic for me, the language could be a barrier. Huge mistake, since that prevented me from selecting good quality courses simply because they were not in my mother tongue.

I was afraid of not understanding the teacher and therefore not understanding his explanations. Which could have been solved by taking the time to see the first lessons of each course, since Udemy gives you that possibility before buying it. But I didn't even try. I went straight to looking for Spanish web development courses .

I filtered by bestselling courses and bought one. I wanted to get down to work as soon as possible and start learning, so I didn't go any further in my research. If I had, I would have discovered that there are two reasons why a course can be the best seller of any platform:

• because it’s the best
• because it was the first of its niche

It took me months to realize that my first web development course fell into the second category . I held on as long as I could, until the course got so bad that I stopped beating myself up, I left it halfway and I started looking for another. This time, with no language filter. And the quality leap was massive.

I prefer not to mention the crappy course in Spanish that I did, but I will give names below of the courses that were (and still are) tremendously useful to me.

Fortunately, with the abandonment of my first crappy-course, I also ditched a habit that I still had from my university times: taking notes. Taking notes has nothing wrong. My mistake was the format. I took them by hand because I thought I was absorbing the concepts better. Not only is this reasoning useless for studying programming, but it is also very time-consuming.

I wasted hours and hours taking notes that I never really used. Every time I wanted to refresh a concept, I would search for it directly in Google. The only purpose of my notes was to gather dust.

Another of my pitfalls was that I was not very sure about what exactly I had to learn to become a frontend developer or about the content that a course should have to be considered acceptable and useful.

In my experience, it was a mistake to buy a course that contained, in about 35 hours, and according to its promotional message, enough material to become, not only frontend developer, but a full stack developer. They supposedly taught you:

• HTML
• CSS
• Bootstrap
• JavaScript (from now on, JS)
• A JS framework (React)
• NodeJS
• PostgreSQL

and even more things. At a certain point in the course, they started teaching React. That's when I realized that I still had the JS level of a minion, so I got frustrated, and again, I left the course halfway.

But that was the last time I did something like that. By then, I had already spent a couple of months learning, so, things were a little clearer than before. At least I finally knew what I didn't know, what I should learn and how to learn it. So, I decided that I would do one course (at least) for each topic, namely:

• HTML and CSS
• JS
• a JS framework

And from that on, things started to go smoothly. Therefore, if today I had to start over, I would know much better which path to choose and what stops to make along the way.

No need to do that, I'll tell you about it .

I’m a big fan of the Phoneless religion, a joke (with tons of reality underneath) invented by Joan Boluda. When I started working as a developer, I noticed that I didn't even have a phone on my desk. For what? In general, developers don't have direct contact with clients, that is up to the Project managers.

To stay in touch with my team, nothing better than a chat platform, like Slack. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in for a call when needed, but to stay in touch with my colleagues, a chat is less intrusive than a call, allowing you to focus better on your work.

Talking about distractions, being a developer also involves a high possibility to work from home. This is a tricky issue, because there are people who have more distractions at home than at the office. In my opinion, unless you have special circumstances where you must take care of someone, I think that staying focused is simply a matter of discipline (and maybe having the fridge far away).

In my company we have been working remotely since the COVID-19 outbreak and I, as most of my colleagues, couldn’t be happier. I have never been so productive and had so good work/life balance.

Another topic is the female/male ratio. At the moment things are very unbalanced, I really don't quite understand why. I would love to hear your opinion about it in the comments .

In my company the ratio is approximately ... 10 to 1. In fact, during my first year there I was the only IT girl. That being said, I never had any issue with that, because my co-workers are simply awesome. But numbers don’t lie.

I could go on talking about a developer’s worklife, but I think this is a good summary. If you are interested, in this  Andrei Neagoie course there is a very interesting section about it. For more details on the courses I recommend, read on .

In other words, make sure what you like the most, the frontend or the backend. You can check out YouTube videos, like this one from Max, one of my teachers on Udemy. Don't spend too much time on this, and keep in mind that choosing one does not mean discarding the other. You can always learn it later. Choosing one simply means picking your starting point.

I admit it: I am a planning freak. I love planning everything. Always knowing what my next step is helps me achieve my goals. Therefore, I recommend that you design a learning plan.

Because feeling lost when learning to code is a natural part of the journey, but sticking to a plan will help you not walk blindly.

In my case, the plan consisted of:

• ️ study at least 1 hour a day, 6 days a week
•  eliminate distractions (when I study I leave my phone in another room)
•  reduce my working hours
•  have a study buddy
•  divide the study into small tasks

In fact, I studied many more hours a day, but that was the minimum. I talk about it in detail in my Geek Challenge 365. I didn't study alone either, and that's something that helped me enormously. When I decided to study programming, my boyfriend hopped in and started studying too.

Although our subjects had little to do with each other (he studied data science and machine learning), I felt very accompanied and supported. It would have been very difficult to study if every time I came home I had found him watching TV or so.

Instead, we teamed-up. When it was study time, we studied. When it was time to go out and rest, we relaxed. When one of us was stuck, we encouraged each other to keep going.

Whenever we overcame a challenge, we shared the joy, because shared happiness tastes better.

So if you have the opportunity to drag your partner or another innocent victim into studying like I did, don't hesitate. A fellow companion will be of a lot of help .

In case it is not easy for you to find that friend in your close environment, there is a very millennial alternative: find a programming buddy within a platform specialized in that, such as the Zero to Mastery Academy.

As for the study itself, I have several learning techniques. In my previous job in the Administrative/Financial legal sector, I asked to work 80% instead of full time. With that I got to work 4 days a week instead of 5. So, here's one: steal as much time as you can to study .

Another thing I always do when I study is to get my phone away from me and silence it. This way I remove the source of most of my distractions, leaving only space for study, which I usually organize by blocks. Nothing fancy, I just watch each lesson (on video) twice. The first, without pausing it, and the second, pausing it and writing the code the teacher explains, always trying to understand the why of everything.

To understand that why, practice everything the teacher proposes, and go much further. When you take online courses, it is very easy to get carried away and watch lesson after lesson like a movie. It is not.

If you value your time, take it seriously.

It was not the only course I did, but it was the first with which I truly began to understand JS. The truth is that, although most courses claim that "this is the ONLY course you need to learn JS", in my experience, it will be convenient for you to do more than one. For many reasons:

• ️ they will explain the same concept to you from different perspectives, as they are different teachers
•  you will reinforce your knowledge about JS, since they will explain concepts that you presumably already know, because you will have already done a course that explains it.

Therefore, my recommendation is that you take more courses, like this JS course that I took, from Jonas.

I use it as an index on the world of web development in general, as well as the last transversal course that I am going to recommend you: The complete web developer - Zero to mastery, by Andrei Neagoie. Again, this will help you brush up on everything you've learned from JS (trust me, you'll need it). Also, Andrei includes two very interesting sections in his course.

One last thing I love about Andrei's course is that, like Jonas, he has a newsletter about web development. And, forgive me Jonas, but Andrei's is much more elaborated. It’s also true that Andrei has a bigger team behind. Also, there is no reason to not subscribe to both .

As you continue with your JS courses, it’s a good time to start listening to podcasts. I think that if you start before learning JS you will be super lost (it happened to me) and therefore, you will only waste time. I have one specific recommendation: Syntax.

If you prefer to rely on books to learn JS, you will love the You don't know JS saga.

In any case, and in order not to get confused, I always try to use the terms in English, because is the human language used in programming languages. For that reason (although it’s not the most important) I am also going to recommend that you take the Angular course by Max Schwarzmüller.

•  My chair: for years, I have worked and studied with a € 50 Ikea chair, with some extra armrests. It was such a crappy fix. But since my company sent us to work from home due to the outbreak, I saw the ideal opportunity to upgrade, and I could not be happier. This chair takes special care of the neck, down back and arms. The best thing I bought in years. The armrests are the crucial part for me, because with such a short distance from the table to the wall, I cannot rest my forearms on it. Hence the importance of armrests.

•  My laptop: it’s the company laptop, which I use both for work and study. My personal computer is a Toshiba that has lasted me since college, but having this powerful Lenovo, I hardly ever use mine.

•  My keyboard and mouse: it’s a wireless pack, with only a USB stick to connect it to any of your laptop ports. It’s 3 years old and I have changed the batteries only once.

• My glasses: I don’t need glasses, these are simply to block the blue light. I bought them shortly after I started studying programming, as I started to get constant headaches. And when I say "constant", I mean every day. There is a “before and after” these glasses. If you already wear glasses, all you have to do is ask the optician to add a blue filter blocker.

• My monitor: I need to work with two screens (laptop + an extra screen). Three better than two, but you see that my desktop only fits my laptop + an extra screen. Being so close to it, it was not convenient for me to buy a monitor larger than 24 inches. Keep this in mind when designing your workspace, because if you have enough distance from the beginning of your table to the wall for your forearms, you may prefer a bigger one like this, of 28 inches.

•  My earbuds: Since I only need earbuds for videocalls and music, I don't complicate my life. I use these simple headphones with microphone.

•  My code editor is Visual Studio Code, a huge leap in quality compared to Sublime Text. It's built by Microsoft and it's free. What else can you ask for .

•  My music: I usually use Accuradio and choose a classical music station. Yes, I am much more productive with classical music. Ey, every person is different...