How To Get Started
If you are looking to break into tech and feeling overwhelmed by the ocean of content, I can offer a few suggestions for you to consider. If time teleportation were a real thing, most of the tips below are what I would suggest to myself to start again from today.
Write Down Your Why
This will be a long journey, whether you are picking up a brand new career or switching from another role. You will need a strong statement on why this matters to you. It will help you along the way and act as a guiding star. It’s where you want to aim and will lead to a story you want to portray. Start with why, then figure out the hows and act on the whats.
Pick a Learning Path
Since you are starting new, you would have no idea where to start, and the online information is chaotic with lots of different jargon that seems important, like frontend, backend, TypeScript, Data Structures and Algorithms, or even Rust. You might be confused and unsure about the path to take. Fortunately, there are communities that help bridge this gap, offering comprehensive guides and tutorials to lead the way into the beginner village. Two platforms I constantly hear good things about are freecodecamp and the Odin project. They are completely free and have a decent community size, which would be very useful to form a team of individuals on a similar journey (more on this below). You could go quite far with one of these resources before needing to explore other things on the map. Ideally, this will take you at least 3 months or more because it can be quite overwhelming at first.
Understand the Concepts Deeply
As you can only connect the dots backward, spend time investigating at each dot. Learn the reasons why a certain thing is done in a particular way, either in the mind or in code. Try to simulate things and make assumptions on the current topic. Let’s say you already know A, and now you are learning B. Think about how A will work with B. To your knowledge, everything is somewhat connected. Perhaps what changes is only the shape or form. Try to learn the same concept from a different point of view, and maybe you will get a better understanding of what’s going on. No, you don’t need a computer science degree. It’s just an expensive piece of paper. What you need is the knowledge within, and there are tons of resources to learn from without listening to a boring professor who speaks at 0.5 speed. Be curious, stay humble.
Recruit a Close Team
There are a few reasons I say forming a team would be really great for the continuity of learning and growth. In a pragmatic sense, working together as a team resembles the dynamics at work. You will be working closely within a team, and your influence will grow to a point where you have to interacts with other teams or steakholder. You need to build the calluses of working on a task with a group of people from different backgrounds. Collaboration is key to making great software. Building this skill is a necessity for your career. On a personal level, it promotes psychological safety when you know there are teamates that could help you along the way. Most often, the key to a working solution is just a few feedbacks from your peers, they may be able to see your blind spots. Forming a support group and working towards the same goal is always motivating, especially at times when it gets difficult.
To form a team, you could simply go out to different online/offline communities and ask if there is anyone on a similar journey willing to commit to working together. It could be building a project together, code reviewing each other’s pull requests, reviewing/showcasing the concepts one recently acquired, or doing mock interviews. The important thing is the group meets at least once a week and does it for at least 3 months. I can assure you this will make your learning a lot more fun.
Don’t Look at Tech Influencers
One last point I’d like to share is to try your best to avoid influence from social media. There is a lot of content out there, and it’s more of a distraction than motivation in most cases. At best, you might get a piece of information that is a useful trick. On average, you might get something that could potentially be useful one day, but in the near term, it’s completely irrelevant. At worst, you receive the wrong intel. Just focus on what you need to know, and only when you need something new should you take a look. Though, I have to confess I am better at saying this than doing it.
Conclusion
As you have noticed, my tips aren’t necessarily a step-by-step guide on how I would get started. One reason is because you probably already have an idea of what you need to do to begin with. I feel like this is something I would tell my younger self when I got started. Identify why you want to break into tech, pick a route, immerse yourself in new concepts, find friends, and don’t get distracted. Good luck and happy coding!