Now! You might as well. What’s the worst that could happen? You won’t end up getting the job? You didn’t have the job anyway, so nothings changed.
What if I flunk the interview? You will always mess up during your first few interviews. You will get better with practice.
You have no experience?, well, okay, that’s fair enough. If you don’t feel comfortable applying with no experience, then here is a checklist of stuff that helped me when I was applying for jobs.
Create a project.
I always hark on about this, in absence of experience, make your own experience. You can do this by creating your own project. If you want to be a web developer, create a website.
If you want to be a Software Developer, create an application/web-app. By doing this, you will have something to talk about during the job interview.
Pro-tip: Write any difficult things you encountered when creating your project and how you overcame them. You can then talk about your experiences during a job interview.
Learn Test Driven Development (TDD)
Most companies will incorporate Test Driven Development in their development processes. When you are starting out, practice test driven development when doing code challenges or when you are creating your project.
Learn about Object Oriented Design (OOD)
Most of you will deal with object-oriented programming languages, so understanding how to do OOD is important. Also, familiarising yourself with SOLID principles will help you write maintainable, flexible code.
Know your programming language
You don’t have to be an expert with the language, although it helps obviously. You should be comfortable to read up on the parts that you’re not familiar with and learn about them.
For example, my primary programming language is JavaScript. I rarely ever use Generators in JavaScript, but if I ever had to, I could read up on them and use them.
Conclusion
Expertise comes with time. When you are first starting out, employers are hiring you, hoping you can figure things out. You don’t have to know everything on this list, but doing so will definitively help you when you get your first job.
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