Finding a software development path

Pevijil · March 2020

Hello,

I’m pretty new to the site and programming. I was just wondering with the peerless amount of software/ type of jobs that are out there, how do people find out what they want to do? The long lists of requirements in job listings are a bit daunting.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Thank you

DFTK13 · March 2020

You’re right, the lists are long, usually 4-5 programming languages, some frameworks and methodology or stack. So the thing is, a lot of software engineering is moving toward web based apps, PWAs. So from this the term “front end”, “backend”, “full stack” started coming about. In the front end, that’s what you see, the interface and how you interact with the software. The backend is developing the underlying “gears” that make the front end functional such as api, database and so forth. Then full stack is when you do both. I found out that I really enjoyed front end web app development with some basic backend functionality to be able to make an api call to get info to populate my app.

I first got involved with web development with basic html/css when I was 13, but didn’t really get involved with it again until I bought Colt Steele’s web development course on udemy, I actually got to build real apps there. My advice, find a top rated full stack course on udemy, wait till they go on sale for $10, and get one. My favorite is Andrei Neagoie, he is the most relevant and current teacher on there in my opinion. Right now, NodeJS, Express, Javascript/React, and PostgreSQL is the stack highly sought after in many jobs. If I were you, I would learn JavaScript and then React as well as learning SQL. The best way to learn is to build projects and incorporate these. But the most important thing is to learn exactly how programming structure and flow works. Loops, conditionals, arrays...etc, then the knowledge will transfer to many other languages.

The bottom line is there’s so many different areas in software development. I’m just listing out one of the most common types of developer and their skill set that will net them a good job.

Finding a software development path

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