How to land your first job as a developer?

I used to think that the path to becoming a successful software developer requires a ton of knowledge & years of experience, I was very insecure about my capabilities of landing a job.

Now standing at this point after 5 years of being a professional developer having landed plenty of internships, jobs, and freelance projects, in fact, built a startup from scratch, I wish I could tell this set of advice to my younger self, that I’ll be sharing below.

My name is Aquib Jawed and I'm building Fueler | A portfolio-based tool that helps you to show your Proof of Work.

This short masterclass will help you to learn, execute and land your dream job within 3 months. There is a 0% chance of failure if you learn and apply what’s inside.

How did I land my job as a developer/software engineer?

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln.

This quote pretty much sums up the whole advice I'm about to share. So if there was one thing you had to take away from this article, I would encourage you to remember that quote.

Before my development journey, I was the typical teen who was influenced by society and by the traditional education system.

Till the very 1st year of my engineering course, I didn’t know anything about development until web development training came into the picture in my college during the winter break.

After attending that training, I started developing an interest in web development and started practicing HTML, CSS, & JavaScript with a bit of Django as a backend.

After practicing coding for a couple of months, I started visiting those Workshops organized by Google Developers Group. In the very beginning, I used to attend these workshops & sessions just for free swags & free pizza.

But then after a couple of workshops, I met an amazing personality Aaquib Hussain, He was running a startup at one of the workshop venues and was hiring for a developer position, and I thought this would be an amazing opportunity to land a position in his startup.

I gathered all the courage that I had and approached him for an internship opportunity, his response was “Show me what you’ve done so far”. for a moment I went blank and that was the biggest realization of my entire career, that your abilities can only be justified by ‘what you show not what you say.’

Fast forward to 5 months I landed that internship and was lucky enough to find a mentor who made my journey 10x easier. It’s often rare to find the right mentor at the right time - but I’m sure you’re here reading this article because you don't have that one helping hand showing you the direction

Don’t worry keep reading until the end to eliminate all your confusion and unlock a premium bonus.🤩

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Advice for budding developers

Find your niche, Front-end Backend, and get started:

Imagine standing in the woods and there is multiple paths you can follow the worst thing you can do is try to experience all the paths all at once but, the wisest thing you can do is to do thorough research about each path & chose one that feels the best for you that’ll eventually make your development journey more sustainable and that's how you are already ahead of 90% of beginners and you don’t feel lost in the midway.

Some of the top niches are

Front-end Developer
Backend Developer
Full Stack Developer
DevOps

Build a strong foundation:

Even though the practice-first approach is highly advisable when it comes to learning how to code, you shouldn’t neglect fundamental knowledge and underestimate its importance. Knowing basic fundamentals helps you to build a strong foundation for your development journey.

Investing time to understand the core concepts is very crucial in acing your skills.

Here are some of the resources that helped me personally sharpen my skills.

Practice and Build tons of projects

Apply the skills you’re learning by solving some real-world problems then only you’ll be able to implement the learning that’ll eventually clear your concepts. For eg, if you’re reading a tutorial on how to build a discord bot with JavaScript, try building your own bot. You’ll be doing two great things for your career at the same time:

Practicing and honing transferable skills.
Building your Proof Of Work with actual case studies and proofs of concept.

Daily share one thing that you've learned with your community online you do not have to have a huge following to share tips and hacks - Your community of 10 people is enough to hold you accountable for your success when learning a new language or building a project.

Some of the places where you can publicly celebrate your wins and loses can be your Insta stories or LinkedIn or Twitter - Never be afraid to hit publish after all they are just 10 people.

Start building your projects or take challenges with the hashtag #buildinpublic on Twitter eg.

My first designed email is ready to be sent after your registration to the MakersDiary beta waitlist 😁.

Will be sent with AWS SES! Thx @SimonHoiberg & @sandro_vol for your help. ❤️

Landingpage is coming soon.#buildinpublic pic.twitter.com/wyOQwFp8w1
— Danilo à Tellinghusen ▪️ ☕ & 🍕 (@sleepless_fox) August 21, 2022

Network with great people you admire and Build your personal brand:

Until now that, you've started building in public which has its own benefits you’ll start building a brand for yourself where you’ll be teaching those who aspire to be a developer. Join communities on Discord and other platforms like IndieHacker or Hashnode. there are best practices that can help you hone your skills and meet like-minded folks:

Participate in hackathons
Take a self-disciplinary challenge like 100daysof Code challenge
Attend seminars & workshops
Join Bootcamp

Roadmap to land your dream job

If you’ve followed me till now, you’re already ahead of the majority of beginner developers, and if you have been wondering that I wish there was a step-by-step roadmap, from Day 1 until the day you land your dream job, you’re in the right place.

Pick your niche.
Learn relevant skills
Practice and build projects
Build Proof of Work
Update your resume and LinkedIn.
Start applying
How can you strengthen your portfolio to showcase your skill set?

Now the question is How & where you’ll build your portfolio. I’ve seen thousands of talented coders were unable to land a job due to a lack of presentation skills, but that doesn’t mean you’ve to learn design skills to build an aesthetically pleasing portfolio.

Let me present to you a tool that helps you show your Proof of Work in just 2 mins. Just signup for Fueler.io & start publishing your works and it’ll do the rest.

Here are some top profiles to take inspiration from.

Aquib, Dhravya, Shubhraagarwal