To all aspiring and actively achieving their goals of becoming a software engineer today, here's a shout out of support and encouragement with friendly recommendations from someone who has shared your enthusiasm for over a year as a student and as a webmaster. On behalf of our community of learners, teachers, tinkerers, and more, welcome! I hope this will help you navigate what can occasionally feel as choppy, difficult to navigate seas in our ever-exponentially-expanding world of new technologies and abstract concepts and ideas leveraged through our machines:
-Be proactive. Whether studying a new language, framework, and/or related concept, etc., creating, updating, and/or maintaining your own contributions to the seemingly innumerable lines of code that have offered greater simplicity and efficiency to people the world over, maintain a thirst for knowledge and for results. A desire and willingness to learn and progress is not only highly desirable, but intrinsic to being able to understand systems and abstract them away via code, and thus essential. As a self-paced/self-study full-stack software engineering student at the Flatiron School, my success was directly tied to my enthusiasm and willingness to immerse myself in the course material; at times, exhaust my ability to ask questions and search for answers related to topics, and learn about new and emerging practices that built on already fine-tuned lesson material.
-Be humble and build from a solid foundation. Break down projects and problems to simple, easy to execute steps and solutions, and continue building up from there. Flatiron exemplifies and validates this approach in training and employing thousands of software engineers by beginning with fundamental concepts such as DRY code, CRUD, MVC structure, RESTful routing, and coding with language syntax, then building on these and showing how they incorporate into newer frameworks, from Ruby, to Sinatra, to Ruby on Rails, to fullstack Ruby on Rails and JavaScript, to fullstack Ruby on Rails and ReactJS.
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