I’m in my late 30’s and I’m a junior dev, having been in the role for just over a year. If you are persistent you can do it. From my experience it has been a hard and at times frustrating job simply because there is so much I don’t know, but that comes with the reward of the eureka moment, where when something works it is one of the best feelings.

Now in terms of doing a school, if it’s a scheme where you pay for the training and they say they’ll get you a job at the end, please be cautious. I have a few friends that went down this route and they say they were the lucky ones to land jobs, but in their groups everyone else was left out in the cold at the end.

This was just my process but I did the Java MOOC course that taught me enough to get going, I was doing this at the same time as working in IT. It’s completely free. For frontend learning I’ve been using Scrimba which has free content but also a paid for subscription, it has been alright and the way they merge the recordings with the IDE is good and the free content feels more substantial than what you’d get with Codecademy.

I’m still just a noob at all of this, and there is so much I don’t know but I’m happy to try and answer any questions you have.

Thanks for this, almost every day can be a challenge but that’s what I signed up for when I switched to software development! I’ll keep what you’ve said in mind and try to put it to practice 🙂

Over a year in as a junior dev and I’m still in the second stage. I did 6 months backend and now I’m now entering my 6th month as frontend. I still know so little, but I know more than I did yesterday.

My biggest challenges:

• I don’t know what questions to ask when it’s about something I don’t know.
• Having a rough idea as to how I want to try and solve a problem, but not knowing how to code it
• Trying to retain so much new information on a daily basis and then remember everything from the days before
• (What I hope is) Imposter Syndrome on a weekly basis

I just keep on trying, try to understand what I can and ask for help when I feel I’m at a blocker.

Ctrl+shift+esc was so useful back when I learned it. I still see people press ctrl+alt+del and click to open task manager. Or alternatively (but not as bad imo) right clicking on the start button and selecting to open task manager