From humanities to developers in numbers and colors
Hello, Habr! I’ve been reading you for a long time, but everyone didn’t get their hands on writing something of their own. As usual - home, work, personal affairs, back and forth - and here you are again putting off writing the article until better times. Recently, something has changed and I will tell you what made me describe a small piece of my life about becoming a developer with examples, which may be useful to beginners, doubters, and frankly not believing in themselves guys. Go!
I'll start from afar - in childhood, my parents gave me a huge amount of encyclopedias and books - for all occasions. Any reason to give a gift is a book. Then, of course, I was not grateful to them, but simply took it for granted. But over time, communicating with other people, I made a strange conclusion: many did not know what I knew, did not hear any names, concepts, concepts, did not read the authors, and did not watch films. At that very moment, insight came: here it is, KNOWLEDGE. For a long time I did not know where to apply all this, because simple communication with people is not paid at all, and there was no profession to tell interesting stories at that time (now there are some bloggers, YouTube, TED-ED, etc.). I studied English, long and painstakingly, because “It was promising and useful in the future” - at that time confidence in the future profession, Of course, it wasn’t, therefore, through “I don’t want” I was driven to the lessons again and again. Now, of course, I am extremely grateful that I did not jump off at that moment and managed to get a good base, which, of course, played an important role in choosing my future profession.
I’m not a simple humanist, but a “hybrid”: having pumped up soft-skills and adoring to organize people’s activities, I, at the same time, am interested in physics, chemistry, economic phenomena, computer science and popular science materials. At school, I even took exams in physics and entered the budget at a technical university! Having submitted documents to several universities at once to diametrically opposed faculties, until the last moment I was not sure what to choose. After entering the budget, signing all the papers and talking with the dean, my father and I arrived home and went about our business with a sense of accomplishment.
However, when I woke up in the morning, I was surprised to realize that an annoying and prickly thought settled in my head: “We must go to ped (pedagogical)”. How did it form there: on its own or as a result of shadow processes, like Mendeleev’s, when in a dream he systematized data, gaining knowledge of the table of periodic elements? I will never know this, but I went to my parents, described the problem to them, received some rather piquant assessments of my current thought processes, their direction and overall development, but did not back down.
In the end, we arrived at the university, took the documents (although this was most likely illegal, because the enrollment had passed) and went to submit documents to another university. My father then had a very short haircut, just had an eye operation and took off his glasses, and in general, looked like a typical “brother from the 90s”, despite 2 higher educations and a teacher’s past. Of course, they could not refuse such a colorful character. Since then, I have never regretted that I entered the faculty of foreign languages.
Working with children, I understood two things:
As a result, after several years of work as a teacher (English, German and a little Spanish), I decided to leave the profession, because banally burned out. Probably, many of you are familiar with this feeling: it seems that the work is the same, the same people, work, everything that suits yesterday - but the soul resists every working day, the mistakes of the children began to annoy internally, the calm that was always somewhere inside , panic thoughts began to disappear about how to escape at least somewhere.
Throughout my career, I considered the possibility of changing the profession to something more relevant, not related to working with people, having made about 10 attempts to independently study programming languages. C ++, C #, Delphi, Python, Pascal, Java - all this was complicated, incomprehensible, frightening, time-consuming and without any result. In fact, I simply did not have enough motivation: neither the crisis of 2008-2009, nor the problems in 2014-2015 changed my attitude to work. And when emotional burnout came, it became clear that I couldn’t work like that anymore, for the sake of the children whom I didn’t want to hurt.
In 2018, I moved to Moscow from Krasnoyarsk with my girlfriend, she transferred to a local university, and I found work in a private school of foreign languages. A new place, a decent salary, new people and feelings - all this allowed me to breathe life into me for about six months, after which the old problems returned.
Inside me, the final decision to change my profession matured, a plan was outlined, the job market was studied, requirements for applicants, contacts of friends and acquaintances who were at least somehow connected with IT were dug up and I thoroughly gutted their brains with their meticulous questions. In general, the plan turned out to be like this:
The easiest things for me were given HTML and CSS - about 2 weeks. During this time, I put together a site layout of some designer using pure HTML and CSS and put together all possible crutches, studied a bunch of approaches and realized that manually writing all of these lines is insanely long. Googling a little, I immediately stumbled upon Bootstrap 4 and, having familiarized myself with the possibilities, began to read the documentation. After a couple of days of thoughtful smoking of manuals interspersed with watching various training videos on YouTube, I set about creating my own totally responsive site, with pictures, cards and animations. It took about 2 weeks, for which I discovered jQuery as a DOM-manipulation tool.
Of course, this was not the best choice, but everything was simple, clear, and the result was important to me. By the way, I recommend not listening at this stage to cool programmers who offer optimizations and improvements, but simply to find the most common use case for the code, watch examples and just copy the style. The task at the initial stage is one: if only it would work. Then you can think about everything else, and when you work in the company, they will explain and show you the local standards, which you will need to follow.
The hardest part began at the stage of learning pure JavaScript - a very serious question arose in my head: why learn this if jQuery is easier? I went to Google for the answer: it turned out that jQuery would soon go to another world, with the exception of legacy code, and all programmers use JS, because frameworks come and go, and pure JS is relevant. But we want to get a job and do it for a long time, right? So I started watching videos, trying to write code and functions on training sites, and rewrite my previous projects. Naturally, at first it turned out a little less than nothing, but after a couple of days, without thinking, I prescribed all sorts of arrow-functions (which turned out to be easier than usual), worked with document.getElementById selectors, sorted arrays and extracted elements of objects using .map, .filter, .reduce, worked with API and AJAX, etc.
And I was not mistaken - when I studied React, I came across a ton of JS code that needed to be disassembled and understood, otherwise nothing worked. Taking a deep breath and feeling sorry for myself a little, I began to delve into the essence of the process with a vengeance. It soon turned out that React was a slightly modified HTML (JSX) + body kit from various tools that made it easy to refresh the page and create a SPA (single-page application). Add a pinch of JS - and we have animations, downloads and transitions. Accustomed to the syntax, I took the first layout of the online store and wrote a simple SPA that allowed me to select categories, navigate the site and change the counters of goods in the basket.
In general, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that you have never programmed in life, there isn’t - if you work on yourself gradually, then everything is possible. Even without knowledge of the English language - there are many Russian-language sites that will be enough for the initial stage. Good luck!
A link to training materials, YouTube channels, articles and everything that I used in my training.
I'll start from afar - in childhood, my parents gave me a huge amount of encyclopedias and books - for all occasions. Any reason to give a gift is a book. Then, of course, I was not grateful to them, but simply took it for granted. But over time, communicating with other people, I made a strange conclusion: many did not know what I knew, did not hear any names, concepts, concepts, did not read the authors, and did not watch films. At that very moment, insight came: here it is, KNOWLEDGE. For a long time I did not know where to apply all this, because simple communication with people is not paid at all, and there was no profession to tell interesting stories at that time (now there are some bloggers, YouTube, TED-ED, etc.). I studied English, long and painstakingly, because “It was promising and useful in the future” - at that time confidence in the future profession, Of course, it wasn’t, therefore, through “I don’t want” I was driven to the lessons again and again. Now, of course, I am extremely grateful that I did not jump off at that moment and managed to get a good base, which, of course, played an important role in choosing my future profession.
I’m not a simple humanist, but a “hybrid”: having pumped up soft-skills and adoring to organize people’s activities, I, at the same time, am interested in physics, chemistry, economic phenomena, computer science and popular science materials. At school, I even took exams in physics and entered the budget at a technical university! Having submitted documents to several universities at once to diametrically opposed faculties, until the last moment I was not sure what to choose. After entering the budget, signing all the papers and talking with the dean, my father and I arrived home and went about our business with a sense of accomplishment.
However, when I woke up in the morning, I was surprised to realize that an annoying and prickly thought settled in my head: “We must go to ped (pedagogical)”. How did it form there: on its own or as a result of shadow processes, like Mendeleev’s, when in a dream he systematized data, gaining knowledge of the table of periodic elements? I will never know this, but I went to my parents, described the problem to them, received some rather piquant assessments of my current thought processes, their direction and overall development, but did not back down.
In the end, we arrived at the university, took the documents (although this was most likely illegal, because the enrollment had passed) and went to submit documents to another university. My father then had a very short haircut, just had an eye operation and took off his glasses, and in general, looked like a typical “brother from the 90s”, despite 2 higher educations and a teacher’s past. Of course, they could not refuse such a colorful character. Since then, I have never regretted that I entered the faculty of foreign languages.
Working with children, I understood two things:
- I really like it, I can interestingly tell, weave information from books and encyclopedias into the story and, most importantly, achieve results in the field of teaching English
- There is sorely lack of money, even if you work part-time (private lessons + language all-season children's camp)
As a result, after several years of work as a teacher (English, German and a little Spanish), I decided to leave the profession, because banally burned out. Probably, many of you are familiar with this feeling: it seems that the work is the same, the same people, work, everything that suits yesterday - but the soul resists every working day, the mistakes of the children began to annoy internally, the calm that was always somewhere inside , panic thoughts began to disappear about how to escape at least somewhere.
Throughout my career, I considered the possibility of changing the profession to something more relevant, not related to working with people, having made about 10 attempts to independently study programming languages. C ++, C #, Delphi, Python, Pascal, Java - all this was complicated, incomprehensible, frightening, time-consuming and without any result. In fact, I simply did not have enough motivation: neither the crisis of 2008-2009, nor the problems in 2014-2015 changed my attitude to work. And when emotional burnout came, it became clear that I couldn’t work like that anymore, for the sake of the children whom I didn’t want to hurt.
In 2018, I moved to Moscow from Krasnoyarsk with my girlfriend, she transferred to a local university, and I found work in a private school of foreign languages. A new place, a decent salary, new people and feelings - all this allowed me to breathe life into me for about six months, after which the old problems returned.
Inside me, the final decision to change my profession matured, a plan was outlined, the job market was studied, requirements for applicants, contacts of friends and acquaintances who were at least somehow connected with IT were dug up and I thoroughly gutted their brains with their meticulous questions. In general, the plan turned out to be like this:
- Choose the simplest, the fastest in terms of results and from the very beginning paid at least in the previous place of work. It became frontend development. Judge for yourself: knowing English at the C2 level, most of the code represented for me English teams interspersed with syntax that was quite well remembered (driven by thoughts in the style of “either this or you don't work at all”). The result in the frontend is immediately visible - this is the finished page. Payment is also not bad, from 40 thousand rubles (according to hh.ru). My salary at that time was about 60-65 + personal part-time jobs ~ for 20 thousand. This was not enough, but when you need to fight with yourself to just come to work, no money is good.
- Payment and action plan: I am aiming at 60+ rubles, so I began to study the list of technologies relevant for the frontend: HTML, CSS, JavaScript (ES5-6), React. They were supplemented by tools that facilitate coordination and work with code at different stages: jQuery, Git, SASS, webpack, VS Code. This allowed us to outline a plan for studying all of this gradually, simultaneously applying knowledge in creating websites, disassembling and translating models and consultations with friends into code.
- Self-study: From February 2019 to June 2019, I studied all this, carefully studying the documentation, reading StackOverflow and looking for answers to the most stupid questions that might arise. It was hard for me - sometimes the code just didn’t want to work the way I imagined. But I did not despair - the analysis of the code example + documentation suggested where I made a mistake, what I put wrong and what I did not finish. It was then that every day I praised my parents for insisting on my teaching of the English language in childhood - after all, all the relevant documentation is on it.
The easiest things for me were given HTML and CSS - about 2 weeks. During this time, I put together a site layout of some designer using pure HTML and CSS and put together all possible crutches, studied a bunch of approaches and realized that manually writing all of these lines is insanely long. Googling a little, I immediately stumbled upon Bootstrap 4 and, having familiarized myself with the possibilities, began to read the documentation. After a couple of days of thoughtful smoking of manuals interspersed with watching various training videos on YouTube, I set about creating my own totally responsive site, with pictures, cards and animations. It took about 2 weeks, for which I discovered jQuery as a DOM-manipulation tool.
Of course, this was not the best choice, but everything was simple, clear, and the result was important to me. By the way, I recommend not listening at this stage to cool programmers who offer optimizations and improvements, but simply to find the most common use case for the code, watch examples and just copy the style. The task at the initial stage is one: if only it would work. Then you can think about everything else, and when you work in the company, they will explain and show you the local standards, which you will need to follow.
The hardest part began at the stage of learning pure JavaScript - a very serious question arose in my head: why learn this if jQuery is easier? I went to Google for the answer: it turned out that jQuery would soon go to another world, with the exception of legacy code, and all programmers use JS, because frameworks come and go, and pure JS is relevant. But we want to get a job and do it for a long time, right? So I started watching videos, trying to write code and functions on training sites, and rewrite my previous projects. Naturally, at first it turned out a little less than nothing, but after a couple of days, without thinking, I prescribed all sorts of arrow-functions (which turned out to be easier than usual), worked with document.getElementById selectors, sorted arrays and extracted elements of objects using .map, .filter, .reduce, worked with API and AJAX, etc.
And I was not mistaken - when I studied React, I came across a ton of JS code that needed to be disassembled and understood, otherwise nothing worked. Taking a deep breath and feeling sorry for myself a little, I began to delve into the essence of the process with a vengeance. It soon turned out that React was a slightly modified HTML (JSX) + body kit from various tools that made it easy to refresh the page and create a SPA (single-page application). Add a pinch of JS - and we have animations, downloads and transitions. Accustomed to the syntax, I took the first layout of the online store and wrote a simple SPA that allowed me to select categories, navigate the site and change the counters of goods in the basket.
In general, there’s nothing wrong with the fact that you have never programmed in life, there isn’t - if you work on yourself gradually, then everything is possible. Even without knowledge of the English language - there are many Russian-language sites that will be enough for the initial stage. Good luck!
A link to training materials, YouTube channels, articles and everything that I used in my training.