Cnc Programmer Jobs In Uae
Nancie Fazzari
A few years ago, I wrote an article right here on Dev.to called One Crazy Trick to Become a Programmer. (You can read it here: -crazy-trick-to-become-a-programmer-j8k) Since that time, I've received numerous emails and comments from aspiring coders who are still asking me how to break into the world of professional coding. So I've finally decided to take this a step further and provide some more-detailed suggestions on how to get started as a professional developer.
To be absolutely clear, I still stand behind everything I wrote in that original article. The "soul" of that article is just as applicable today as it was in 2020. But I'll also admit that the original article was a bit... glib. It was also very general - pounding away on the simple (but useful!) mantra of, "WRITE MORE CODE".
Recently, it's become apparent that some people just aren't sure how to translate the general bromides in that article into specific, actionable steps toward fulltime employment. So I'm gonna take it a step further by trying to provide more-targeted advice.
I myself am entirely self-taught. I've never attended a code camp. I've never taken a single course (college or otherwise) on coding. Everything in my modest brain is there because, at some point, I had to sit down, by myself, and figure out how all this stuff works. So I guess you could say that I have a bit of a soft spot for other self-taught devs.
Of course, I realize that there are people with comp-sci degrees who are also struggling to get their first real programming jobs. And if you're in that crowd, there will still be some actionable nuggets of wisdom for you in this article. But my target audience is all the people who received no formal training in application development.
I'm also gonna write this mostly from the perspective of frontend development. But I think the lessons would apply equally if you're a self-taught backend dev. Just swap out some of the technologies that I mention for those that are more applicable to your scenario.
The whole point of my "WRITE MORE CODE" mantra (from the original article) was that no one can magically give you experience. Experience only comes over time. But you can give yourself skills. And the only way you get more skilled as a programmer is to... write more code.
But I'm not gonna take all of this article to just keep hammering away on that mantra. I'm gonna suggest some things you can do to bolster your skills while you're searching for that first company that will grant you some experience.
The first thing is to tailor your employer-facing persona to focus on your skills, and not on your experience. This means that your resume should be skill-centric. Your website should be skill-centric (more on this later...). Any personal projects you take on should be focused on broadening your skills. Basically, you should be constantly thinking about what you can do to add more tools to your toolbelt.
For example, I see many newbies who've been diving into React. And that's great! There's broad demand for React devs and it's wise to have a solid grasp of the library. But many of these devs can do little else besides React.
Have you worked at all with jQuery? (Yes, that technology is getting a little long-in-the-tooth, but it's still massively used and it can teach you a lot about certain core JavaScript concepts - such as anonymous functions.)
How comfortable are you with JavaScript and TypeScript? They're used almost interchangeably today in the workplace and it can be a liability if you're a TypeScript wizard but you get uncomfortable if someone asks you to code something up in plain JavaScript (or vice versa).
I fully realize that, as a newbie in the field, it can feel incredibly daunting to have to tackle all these different "angles" of frontend/JavaScript development. And I'm not asking you to become a JS/TS/React/Angular/jQuery/Node/Vue/Svelte superhero all on your own. But the more of these skills that you can confidently boast about on your resume (and hopefully, during interviews), the better off you'll be.
The point here is that you can't make up a robust job history out of whole cloth. So you'll need to do everything you can to ensure that you can at least boast a well-rounded skillset. You're gonna need to find ways to build up a resume without relying on the one thing that shines in most resumes - a robust job history. That's why you need to focus so hard on bolstering your list of skills.
I could've shoved this under the prior section, but I'm listing it here separately because the modern code camp culture has, IMHO, spawned a small army of new devs who feel pretty good about their JavaScript skills - but have only basic knowledge of HTML/CSS. It's easy for HTML/CSS to feel almost like an afterthought. But it should be your first thought.
Without HTML/CSS, you have no web app. And if your answer to every presentation challenge is to throw everything into a and slap a few style attributes on it, potential employers are gonna spot this right away.
How confident are you with Flexbox? How about Bootstrap? Do you know what "responsive design" means? Can you build a responsive site? There was a time when some of these challenges could be shunted to the design team. But nowadays, employers expect their frontend devs to be completely comfortable with all aspects of HTML/CSS.
Maybe you don't have any repos right now. But from this day forward, every time you complete a coding challenge or spin up some bare-bones web demo, I want you to create a new repo under your GitHub account and store it there. The code in those repos may not be the prettiest or the most advanced. Heck, it may look downright amateurish to a seasoned dev. But you know what looks even worse? Having no public code presence to point potential employers to.
To be frank, I delayed opening a GitHub account for many years. (Although it wasn't a huge problem for me because I was already an established dev before GitHub even existed.) I used to have dozens of little test/demo apps on my local machine that I played around with, but I never put them on GitHub. But those little apps at least provide some evidence of your skillset and the type of work you can do.
A GitHub account also has another (seemingly obvious) benefit. It forces you to get more comfortable with git (if you're not already). In modern dev, git is not a "nice to have". It's a core skillset. As a dev manager, a JavaScript savant who struggles with basic git commands is borderline-useless to me.
(Side note: Last year, at Amazon, there was a guy on our team who somehow managed to get hired without having basic git skills. He lasted all of two months. Quite frankly, I'm surprised he lasted that long.)
Now that you have a GitHub presence, take the next step and open an AWS account. If you're worried about the cost, don't be. It's free to open an account. Most of their services are free to use for the first year. Even after that first year, any costs to you should be extremely minimal unless you start hosting torrents or doing some other kinda high-traffic activity.
Maybe you're thinking that you have no need for AWS because you're not hosting/building public websites/apps. But I'm telling you, it makes life sooooo much easier when you decide to launch even your first little utility.
Using AWS Amplify, I can create a new GitHub repo, throw up some bare-bones code, then hook that repo up to Amplify and have it published, on the web, in minutes. If you want your own domain name for the app, you can purchase that right in AWS with Route 53 and have it live in less than an hour. Amplify even provisions an SSL certificate for free for all of your Amplify sites.
Once you have a GitHub repo hooked up to an AWS Amplify account, every single time you push new code to the repo, it will automatically build-and-deploy your latest code to the public website. It's sooooo easy. And cheap.
Not only does this give you a quick-and-easy (and cheap) path to launch anything, but it will also get you acclimated with the AWS ecosystem, which is a huge selling point with many potential employers. Even if the company you're aiming to work for doesn't use AWS, it looks good on your resume to be able to say that you're familiar with it.
To be clear, AWS is a massive beast in itself. And I'm not telling you to become an AWS Ninja. I'm just suggesting this as one potential way to A) bolster your resume, and B) have a swift path to launch anything that you'd like to publicly display. Of course, you don't have to use AWS. There are other cloud-computing solutions that will give you similar capabilities and experience. The exact platform you choose is up to you.
Now that you have a GitHub account to house your code, and you have an AWS account to deploy your code, you need to have some... code. Yes, this is basically an extension of my "WRITE MORE CODE" mantra. But again, if you don't have a formal work history, you're gonna need some way to at least demonstrate your skill history.
If you're not sure what to build, start with your personal portfolio site. Maybe you haven't done that because you don't have any kinda meaningful portfolio to speak of. But even if your site contains nothing but your resume and a few other trivia facts about yourself, it's a good "first step" to getting a public coding presence.
One important note here: Do NOT half-ass your personal site. Spend some time on it. Try to make it look nice, even if it's weak on content. Pay attention to details like performance and accessibility. (HINT: You can use Lighthouse to generate performance/accessibility reports for your site.) Just last week, a hiring manager at a place where I'm interviewing (and I expect to receive an offer in the next coupla days) told me, during our interview, that he pulled up my site and he was amazed at how well it scored. He said that he frequently does this for candidates and usually the scores are abysmal.
But don't stop building stuff once you have a personal site up-and-running. Build more stuff. I don't even care what you build. The purpose here is not to illustrate that you are The World's Greatest Coder. The purpose is simply to demonstrate to potential employers that you are, in fact, a coder.
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