Yaro's blog

[0] My plan for becoming a software developer in a next 6-12 months.

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Yaroslav
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3 min read

Sorry in advance if my English seems sucks to you 🙂

My name is Yaroslav, and currently I’m a freelancer digital marketer. I’m working with small businesses directly and helping them to achieve their goals with PPC advertisement (Google Ads, Yandex Direct) and web-analytics (including end-to-end analytics).

Some time ago, I’ve decided to switch from that path to a software developer career. Why? It’s a long story, maybe next time.

It was in the end of 2020 when I’ve made a decision to start with Java. Why Java? Because it was the only one language which fit my needs. I had a list of demands at that time: The language should be popular and widely used, and by “popular” I didn’t mean “hype”. It should have static and strict (strong) typing. It should be possible to make various things with it: web apps, Android apps, desktop apps, because at that time I didn’t know what exactly I want to do, and I wanted to try everything. You probably can say: “Hey, what about Kotlin?”. Yes, it fits, but it’s also JVM language, just Java with lots of syntax sugar. So, I was learning Java and making study projects until 24 of November 2022, when my plans got ruined, and I met the need to move to another country (maybe another story).

After 4 months of doing almost nothing but my primary work (and maybe one slow-going telegram user-bot project) I’ve decided to pull myself together, start learning again and find my first dev job as soon as possible. And it wasn’t an easy decision. You see, as I said before, when I chose Java I wanted to try different types of projects to decide what I like more. But in reality, at some point, subconsciously, I decided that I haven’t got enough time for all that and started to associate myself with backend web development. When I’ve decided to learn again, I felt some disgust to Java and the whole idea of working for Enterprise development. I wasn’t sure enough about Java world and I couldn't keep going with that, I was needed to try something new. I remember when I finished my first web Java project, it had some interesting logic inside, but it’s JSP interface was so ugly that I almost didn’t felt any satisfaction from finishing that work. And when time to choosing something new had become, I decided to study frontend.

And here is my web-developer plan for the next 6 months, which I took from a guy on YouTube:

  • August: HTML/CSS + start a blog which will show progress to my future employer 😁
  • September: JavaScript
  • October: First projects, make 3-4 landing pages from Figma-community. Make a GitHub portfolio.
    • OR: If frontend will be not so cool, return to my old Java plan, but remake it by months.
    • OR: If frontend will be not so cool, but JS — 🔥, move towards JS backend (node.js)
    • OR: If frontend is cool and backend desire still with me — look at full stack (react + node.JS)
  • November: First interviews and study React
  • December: 2-3 “real” projects to my portfolio (full web-applications)
  • January: Databases theory and practice, backend.

Further: interviews, projects (maybe open-source), until I find a job.

For more detailed plan, I will look at roadmap.sh and if I return to Java I have a big list of boring books from the last interview.

So, what do you think about my plan? Any advice?

Beginner Developers