Advice for those who don’t have any real world experience
The day before yesterday /u/fallenKlNG was looking for some advice in an /r/AskReddit thread about starting a successful career in coding. /u/JZ5U replied that I should make a self-post in /r/coding, so that’s exactly what I tried to do, but it doesn’t allow self-posts. Instead I publish this on my blog (that is a “bit” short on posts for a long time now). The following is a copy of my advice to him and to everyone else wanting to kickstart their career in the field.
Find an open source project you like and become a contributor. You will learn a lot about how coding works in the real word and gives you visibility. Before I interview an applicant, I usually check their Github profile if they have one.
You ideally should choose a project that you probably will use in the jobs that you would like to apply for. This way you will know that library or whatever much more in depth than most of the competing applicants.
You can also create your own open source hobby projects on Github. I’d recommend to contribute to some larger projects first and if you’re comfortable with that, then start your own project.
It’s a lot of work, but it’s rewarding. You will have lots of experience, people in the industry might be familiar with your name, which is a huge plus and it feels amazing when your commit gets merged in a huge and famous project. It also gives you a chance to get familiar with proper version control practices.
Be sure to always commit nice and clean code, because people will see that and will judge you based on that.
If you don’t know how to start, start with small fixes. That way you get familiar with the codebase and then you can work on bigger things. Oh, and to learn python, you don’t need a class. Good luck! :-)
r1pp3rj4ck's tech blog 