I am new to coding and I have started using code-cademy this week. I am seeking a career change in the near future. I love coding, it is very relaxing to me. I just do not know where to start! I started with the Web Development lesson course and have finished a few modules. I just want to use my time efficiently but I feel like a chicken with his head cut off at this point.
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Hey @jrl-coding, welcome to codecademy!
I guess, if you’re just starting out, what I’d likely suggest is that you dabble a bit.
If you’ve gone straight for the web development track here, is that because that’s what interests you or is it for another reason - for example, you chose it because web development is everywhere, so it seemed a logical starting point?
I don’t think there’s really a “one-size-fits-all” developer role, tbh, so maybe see what interests you and go from there?
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I jumped into the web development role because I noticed it’s in high demand on freelance websites and just in the general job market.
I enjoy the whole aspect of coding and designing programs from scratch. I am open minded and do not have a certain type of program to design in mind. I just enjoy the designing, problem solving, and the satisfaction of a job completed at the end of the day.
Well, I doubt that the web is going to go anywhere anytime soon so there’ll probably always be demand for web developers!
There’s quite a lot of scope to explore within that, though. Obviously, the basics are pretty much universal: HTML as your basic building blocks, CSS to make it look nice, and JavaScript if you want to make it dance.
From there, though, you’ve got a range of things you could branch into. If we stick with JavaScript, and don’t involve any other languages just yet, you could take a look at some of the JavaScript frameworks that can be used to build the front- and back-end of a website - like Angular or React.
Equally, there’s other frameworks and languages out there that you could use. By way of an example, I know how to use Python so when I decided to dabble with some web stuff I stuck with a Python-based framework. In my case, I used Django but Flask is another popular one. (If I remember correctly, Instagram is built on Django…)
There’s also design frameworks like Bootstrap that are out there to help put pages together more quickly, as you don’t have to start from scratch - they’ve done a lot of the hard work, you just put the elements together.
I think the web development track would probably cover off quite a few skills that would be transferable, to use a bit of recuitment jargon, because it covers off both the front-end (UX design) and back-end (processing) aspects of building a web application so you should get a grounding in the concepts involved. Once you’ve got those down, applying those concepts in another (new) language shouldn’t be too difficult if you decided to branch out into something new (like PHP or ASP . NET Core).