My Learning Journey

#webdev #programming #career

Hi there!, my name is Luciano Muñoz and I'm a developer. First of all I want to thank you for taking a few minutes to read me ❤️.

My intention with this blog is to document the learning process in my journey as a developer. I'm not starting from scratch, I have been programming for several years. I did it as a hobby for a long time, and the last few years as a freelancer, in parallel to my current full time job as IT support.

Since a few years for this part I have set myself the goal of getting a job as a developer for a foreign company. After seeing other programmers work for companies in USA, Canada or Germany, and earn salaries in dollars, I felt that was able to do it also. Not just for the possibility of working doing something that I love like programming, but also for the peace of living with a dollarized salary in an economically unstable country like Argentina, with inflation rates that seems to never stop growing.

Long story short, in early 2020 I began to study English, an essential requirement to work abroad; and parallel to my full time job as IT support I continued to carry out freelance projects for local clients in order to continue improving negotiation skills, deadlines managing, etc. In 2021, while I was still taking English classes, the goal changed, the idea of working abroad was still alive but no longer as a freelancer, but as a developer employed in a company or startup. Freelancing was definitely not for me, it requires skills that I didn’t have and that I didn’t like it. I learned a lot in those years as a freelancer and I gained experience that otherwise would have been impossible, but the reality is that all I wanted to do was programming and solve problems.

With the new goal in mind, I began applying to open Backend and Fullstack positions. It was hard to take the decision and overcome my fears, but I did it finally. The responses from the recruiters were not too long in coming, and at the end of 2021 I had my first interviews with foreign companies. To my surprise, I passed the english interviews 👌, but failed the technical interviews 🙈. All this time I had been so focused on improving my English that I had neglected programming.

These first interviews helped me to realize that in my self-taught learning I was skipping and taking many concepts for granted, about which I couldn’t give an answer when interviewers asked me. Beyond that in practice one knows how to write a Class or develop an API, it’s mandatory to be able to explain in word each of these concepts.

So it was that in this 2022 I set myself the goal of learning all those concepts that I am missing, and documenting the process in this blog.

The first step was building a learning roadmap, for which I recommend widely the site roadmap.sh for this purpose. In particular, it helped me a lot the roadmaps for Backend and Python, the language that I use because I think it’s very powerful with a nice and clear syntax.

With the roadmap in hand, the next step was to search for study material, and in that process I found CS50, Harvard’s Introductory Computer Science course, which I thought was a good starting point for the variety of topics it includes, such as algorithms, data structures, memory management, C, Python, Javascript, SQL, among others. David J. Malan is a great instructor, didactic and very clear when teaching.

So, this will be my starting point.

If someone feels an interest in the course, it’s totally free in the edX platform.

See you soon!