I started web development in June with expectations of getting a job in 3 to 6 months max on the basis of the myriad of ‘How I got a developer job in 3 months’ posts and videos online. Well, this is the sixth month and I am proud to say have failed at this. However, this is not all I have failed at.
I have failed to take breaks when necessary , because of my rush to get a role. I have also failed to step up and reboot my drive to learn web development for a month now, because of the number of rejections I've received already.
In September I applied to over 20 internship and junior developer roles and got none. So I decided to focus on learning some more Javascript. I did learn a lot, however, I didn't give myself enough time to assimilate and enjoy what I was learning and in a few weeks I experienced immense burnout.
This hasn't changed for the past month now. In the last month, I have opened my laptop to code for only about 10 hours and this is possibly an exaggeration. the reality is I am probably not job ready by company standards, so my only hope is to keep improving and learning.
A few lessons I have learned thus far are:
- Always finish what you start e.g finish the course I started web development with, by Angela Yu .
- Stop comparing your knowledge base with others. You only hurt yourself this way. Just make sure you understand what you know.
- Be proud of your small projects. Those little wins are important to enjoy creating things.
- You will fail. Not sometimes, but , a lot of the time. But you should accept it anyways and keep failing forwards nonetheless.
- Take breaks from your laptop once in a while, have something apart from code to enjoy, because code alone will fail you.
Never lose the curiosity to learn. The moment it becomes more of a chore is the moment you need to take a break.
I hold these nuggets closer to heart as I restart my web development journey for the second time. I hope this helps someone, and will be glad to receive any feedbacks so as to improve.