How I landed a Software Developer job at the age 16

How it began

It was 14th December 2017 when I first installed Android Studio in my PC. Back then I didn’t understand a single line of code, was really overwhelmed to see such syntax and immediately shut it. Fast forward to March 2018, I took an Android Development Course from Udacity and my programing journey started from that day on. To be honest, Udacity’s simplified courses helped me overcome my fear of code and I was able to try things on my own. I also learnt Java and a bit of GitHub & Git from another website called LearnCodeOnline.

Later that year I started working with IoT for one of my school projects and got the opportunity to travel across the country displaying my project and winning many nation level competitions as well. This gave me the confidence to explore more and soon I started to code as a hobby.
Around March 2019 I started learning JavaScript, I really like that language – it is simple and the most important thing is that we do not need to declare the type. What also fascinated me was that we can develop pretty much everything with JavaScript. After completing JavaScript, I took a React-Native course from LCO which was pretty awesome. It was the first time I used JavaScript to develop products.

Experience with freelance

In the summer of 2019, after learning React-Native, JavaScript and Android Development I thought to get my hands on some freelance projects. I started with supporting some college projects, gained a good initial experience, and gradually moved towards complex projects. Back then I wasn’t aware of the monetary value of this kind of work. I remember having worked on an Android project that had almost 20K lines of code with database, GPS, Notifications and a whole lot of other things, for INR 600. However, I learnt a lot from these projects. I faced many challenges while debugging that improved my debugging skills, and gave me a kick start to work with a real project.

#TeamTanay

After June 2019, I didn’t get much time to code, as I had to study for my 10th board exams. One day I came across a particular video on Instagram where a Microsoft employee, Tanay Pratap was talking about the gaps in our college education system that really touched my heart. I followed him on social media and started learning React from his YouTube videos. It was through his channel that I got to know React is trending in the web world. Coding in React is pretty similar to React-Native and as I have a bit of experience in React-Native, it helped me understand the concepts of React to a great deal. Within a week I was quite comfortable with React.

Finally after my board exams were over in March 2020, I came across the #TeamTanayJobChallenge where one has to build 5 projects, 3 blogs and get 2 reviews in order to get a job interview. I thought of giving it a try to understand the tech world and to assess myself.

Getting into MERN stack

I studied full stack development in MERN from an LCO course, and started with building an e-Commerce site that taught me a lot. I got to work with payment gateways and understood how file structure works in big apps.

Once I had a solid knowledge in MERN, I thought of building clone of big apps as a learning experience. I started with Tinder whose swiping cards feature is cool. I came up with an app named TinDev where developers can left or right swipe other developers and can collaborate based on their coding preferences. It turned out to be quite good with 160+ users.

Likewise, I built a clone of YouTube, called DevTube which has over 500 views. Here I worked with uploading files, playing views, handling likes, dislikes, comments, subscription and many other things.

With different projects I built, I used different CSS frameworks so that I get to work with a variety of CSS flavors.

Getting my job interview

After successfully completing 5P 3B 2R as part of the #TeamTanayJobChallenge, Tanay forwarded my profile to one of the hiring partners, he liked it and that’s how I got my first interview.

It was not a regular interview where the recruiter asks about data structures, algorithms and other technical questions. Instead, I was given a Figma UI design and asked to code in React and submit. My code underwent some code reviews, I was suggested some changes which I addressed and I was hired. Although it seems simple, the whole process was unknown to me, I ended up doing quite a few typos and forgot to adhere to the best practices, but later it was all taken care of.

What do I do?

I am working as a Frontend React Developer, and currently developing an application dashboard that will be managed by the end consumers.

While adapting to this new atmosphere, I am learning a lot from the day to day challenges, and getting to work on new technologies (such as SASS). Overall, I am enjoying this whole experience and look forward to many such opportunities that will strengthen my skills and help me realize my goals.

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