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http://learnwithjeff.com/blog/2012/08/21/how-to-get-a-job-as...
TL;DR: Pushed code daily for about six months, had some awesome people helping me, read a lot of books and listened to smart people talk about code.
I was in CS-specialized class in middle school, but that was kind of a joke.
I am still doing my BSc in CS at the university. The first "dollar" (forint) I earned was back in 2011 when I worked as a non-registered PHP developer for a startup here in town then in Budapest during the summer.
After that, I got employed as a full-time Junior Software Engineer at an international company last August. So I've been here for a year, picking up a lot of experience and earning OK. It is not exactly easy to manage university studies and full-time work, but I can manage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most amazing part of this to me is that it's possible to code for a decade get through a CS degree and be a research assistant without testing or even using source control! I'd probably have gone insane trying to debug under those circumstances.
Welcome to academia. Though, worth noting, source control is on the Joel Test specifically because at least some engineers needed outside ammo to bludgeon their employers into the 20th century. It was very much NOT the case in ~2000 that you could just assume any professional engineering team would be using source control.