Career Strategy

Hey Joshua,

I was in the exact same boat as you when i started out. I would say the best way receive both experience is to do some work for smaller businesses who do not have an online presence. This method goes a very long way as it will help build up your portfolio. I find this way is really good as it will teach you security and the vast difference between production ready code. I would also recommend joining an online group that does meetups, as a lot of startups tend to hire through them. An alternative is to do a bootcamp, but i think that way is only as good as far as your motivation will take you. Feel free to reply if you have any specific questions.

Cheers

Have you built any real sites yet? Or if you can find a senior developer somewhere who is willing to let you contribute to a project (open source?), that would be great experience, and you could learn from him/her. Also, maybe identify areas where you feel your skills are weak, and read a book (or parts of a book) on that topic, then apply that to what you've learned here in a real project. I think putting your work in something like Github or Codepen shows professionalism and is impressive to employers. I have some experience with building/modifying WP sites and tinkering with code, so I am not an absolute beginner But I know I will need to continue to develop my portfolio over the coming months, and do some more unpaid work/projects, before I can even think of applying for a full-time, paying job as a junior front end developer. Hope this helps.

Kareem, agree that security is really important. I am using Sucuri on some WP sites that I built and manage, but what the basic plan does is mostly limited to reporting, rather than prevention. I also installed a Math Capcha plugin, because those sites are constantly being hit with brute force login attempts. I hope it's helping. These are small sites, so much simpler than what you deal with on your production sites. Another site I manage (on another server, one that I'm not responsible for) was hacked a few months ago, and it was a real pain to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it. I never did exactly figure it out, though I could see where some extra tags were inserted. Fortunately, the hosting provider was able to fix it. My experience is all with WP, but my husband is a cybersecurity expert, and he deals with this stuff constantly.