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Best way into front end development for mid 30s career pivot?

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Best way into front end development for mid 30s career pivot?

#1
I've worked as a musician and supplemented that with video production work for about a decade.

In March 2020 when the world shut down for COVID, I started learning web development. Taught myself modern HTML, CSS, Javascript, React, common JS libraries, SASS/SCSS. Built some portfolio. Hustled and did a bit of freelance work.

I am now attempting to find a job doing front end development, but I'll admit it's pretty discouraging to apply for an entry level job with 100+ other applicants and rarely hear back from the company or recruiter.

What would you suggest to someone like me trying to work their way in?

P.S. Currently learning more about MongoDB, node/express, and Typescript because a lot of jobs ask for experience here. Maybe this is the problem? Just not knowing enough tools?

Re: Best way into front end development for mid 30s career pivot?

#2
Same here. Pivoted from video production to web development about four years ago. I went to a coding bootcamp (Hack Reactor) in person here in San Francisco. Great experience and well worth the time and money investment. That said, I was just horrible at interviewing, so it took me longer than most to land my first job (7 months!). Had about 10 on-sites before getting hired.

I found my current gig through another person in my bootcamp cohort. Honestly, cold applications through job boards was just awful - I did about 10 per day and got one hit a week at best. If you can, attend some meetups to meet other engineers and get the word out that you're looking for work.

If you can swing it, try to attend a reputable bootcamp to get up to speed with the finer points of JS, data structures (stacks, queues, binary trees, linked lists, etc), hooks-based functional components in React, and the coding interview. I doubt much has changed with regards to the coding interview in the past four years. Pick up "Cracking the Coding Interview" - my current employer did not put me through hellish whiteboard algorithm nonsense, but it's still pretty much the standard with many employers and I was asked more than once to traverse a binary tree on a whiteboard in JS.

You can learn most of what you need to know on the job, so I advise on specializing and really becoming competent with a few tools and technologies instead of diversifying this early.

Redux is slowly going out of style it seems, but it's still used widely and is one of the more difficult things to pick up as a beginner. So if you're going to add to your repertoire maybe start there if you haven't already.

Keep applying to jobs and learning on the side. Get out there and meet other web developers. Consider a coding bootcamp if you can swing it.

Re: Best way into front end development for mid 30s career pivot?

#3

Same here. Pivoted from video production to web development about four years ago. I went to a coding bootcamp (Hack Reactor) in person here in San Francisco. Great experience and well worth the time and money investment. That said, I was just horrible at interviewing, so it took me longer than most to land my first job (7 months!). Had about 10 on-sites before getting hired. I found my current gig through another per…

i appreciate the insight! A bootcamp isn't in the cards for me for a bunch of reasons, but I do have some friends who are devs and have been helpful in guiding me.

sounds like theres no avoiding the spamming applications part of the process to get that first job though. The worst. A lot of these code meetups turn into other jobseekers eating the free pizza complaining about this part. Luckily, I'm near NYC so I can catch a good amount of these. Usually lots of people from Flatiron School there.

your take on the tech stack is interesting. Seems some people advocate for just getting my feet wet with a bunch of the stuff, then filling in the gaps later vs what you're saying which is more calibrated for those whiteboard style interviews?

I did get a response from a recruiter last week and she mentioned they don't do them, I'd have to do a take home project instead, which I'd vastly prefer!

Re: Best way into front end development for mid 30s career pivot?

#4

Same here. Pivoted from video production to web development about four years ago. I went to a coding bootcamp (Hack Reactor) in person here in San Francisco. Great experience and well worth the time and money investment. That said, I was just horrible at interviewing, so it took me longer than most to land my first job (7 months!). Had about 10 on-sites before getting hired. I found my current gig through another per…

> Redux is slowly going out of style it seems

I'm a Redux maintainer, and this is actually _not_ the case :)

I'll agree that Redux is not quite as popular as it once was, and there's a few different reasons for that. It _was_ drastically overused in the first couple years, and there's other tools that overlap with things people used Redux for (Context for avoiding prop-drilling, React Query and Apollo for data fetching). Redux was also known for requiring a lot of "boilerplate" code.

But, Redux is still by far the most widely used state management tool with React apps - my rough estimates says around 45-50% of React apps use Redux. In addition, "modern Redux" with our official Redux Toolkit package and the React-Redux hooks API is _much_ easier to learn and use than the older style Redux patterns, and eliminates common bugs and the "boilerplate" concerns. We've also recently added a new "RTK Query" data fetching and caching API that solves the same use case as tools like React Query.

The best resource to learn Redux is our official docs tutorials:

- https://redux.js.org/tutorials/index

I've also helped assemble a useful list of learning resources for JS, TS, React, and Redux, hosted over on the Reactiflux Discord site:

- https://www.reactiflux.com/learning

See these articles and presentations for more details on modern Redux, its popularity, and comparisons vs other tools:

- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2022/06/presentations-mode...

- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2021/05/state-of-redux-may...

- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2021/01/context-redux-diff...

Re: Best way into front end development for mid 30s career pivot?

#5
post #4

Same here. Pivoted from video production to web development about four years ago. I went to a coding bootcamp (Hack Reactor) in person here in San Francisco. Great experience and well worth the time and money investment. That said, I was just horrible at interviewing, so it took me longer than most to land my first job (7 months!). Had about 10 on-sites before getting hired. I found my current gig through another per…

> Redux is slowly going out of style it seems I'm a Redux maintainer, and this is actually _not_ the case :) I'll agree that Redux is not quite as popular as it once was, and there's a few different reasons for that. It _was_ drastically overused in the first couple years, and there's other tools that overlap with things people used Redux for (Context for avoiding prop-drilling, React Query and Apollo for data fetchi…

Redux seems like a good one to pick up. I"ve used React Context API to make some things so Redux isn't so intimidating.

From what I can see on this outside, this makes sense.

I'm personally not so picky about what skills I need to learn. its all just stuff at the end of the day that I have to sit down and do.

My question for the moment is always whether or not x, y or z, skill will make me more marketable to get an attempt at demonstrating that I can be a productive employee.

Re: Best way into front end development for mid 30s career pivot?

#6
post #4

Same here. Pivoted from video production to web development about four years ago. I went to a coding bootcamp (Hack Reactor) in person here in San Francisco. Great experience and well worth the time and money investment. That said, I was just horrible at interviewing, so it took me longer than most to land my first job (7 months!). Had about 10 on-sites before getting hired. I found my current gig through another per…

> Redux is slowly going out of style it seems I'm a Redux maintainer, and this is actually _not_ the case :) I'll agree that Redux is not quite as popular as it once was, and there's a few different reasons for that. It _was_ drastically overused in the first couple years, and there's other tools that overlap with things people used Redux for (Context for avoiding prop-drilling, React Query and Apollo for data fetchi…

Noted and actually had a co-worker introduce me to RTK Query yesterday! Thanks for the work you do! I'm going spend some time this week and next looking more deeply into RTK Query.

Re: Best way into front end development for mid 30s career pivot?

#7
post #3

Same here. Pivoted from video production to web development about four years ago. I went to a coding bootcamp (Hack Reactor) in person here in San Francisco. Great experience and well worth the time and money investment. That said, I was just horrible at interviewing, so it took me longer than most to land my first job (7 months!). Had about 10 on-sites before getting hired. I found my current gig through another per…

i appreciate the insight! A bootcamp isn't in the cards for me for a bunch of reasons, but I do have some friends who are devs and have been helpful in guiding me. sounds like theres no avoiding the spamming applications part of the process to get that first job though. The worst. A lot of these code meetups turn into other jobseekers eating the free pizza complaining about this part. Luckily, I'm near NYC so I can c…

I highly recommend you meet one or two folks with experience who can review your take-home stuff before you submit it. I know my job search would have likely gone smoother if I had some feedback. Things like: where things go, how things should be named/structured, what is conventional in the language/framework you're working in etc. are key for take-home assignments.

Re: Best way into front end development for mid 30s career pivot?

#8
Build things, in particular build something that uses an API. For example, build a backend that has some kind of model relationships, a customer DB with products maybe ? Then build a frontend that can list those products and have a customer interact with them in some way.

Another good way to find work is to get some real world experience. Volunteer on some projects. https://socialcoder.org/Home/Index https://www.codeforfun.com/volunteering

If you know python and want to work with a charity in the UK.. https://books2all.co.uk/get-involved/