curriculum VS codewars.com

There were frustrations and compromises and victories, but little by little I can see my progress, and I still enjoy the act of overcoming these new challenges and learning more and more. Each day is another little lesson. I look forward to continuing with The Odin Project and the next challenges, but in the meantime I must return to looking for my alternance (apprenticeship) and maybe a small personal project before launching into the next part of the curriculum.

The Odin Project: With its hands-on approach, The Odin Project guids through everything from basic HTML and CSS to full-stack development.

The Odin Project (https://www.theodinproject.com/)

The Odin Project The Odin Project offers a full-stack curriculum for aspiring web developers. With its project-based approach, you'll gain practical experience while learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more.

TheOdinProject

The Odin Project - Free, open-source platform with a curriculum focused on JavaScript and Ruby for web development.

I'll throw in a vote for teaching yourself or using free resources and communities. Even if you go down the bootcamp route it is going to take a lot of self motivation and work outside of the bootcamp / afterwards in order to become job ready. Or at least do this to start with to make sure you like it.

I did this myself a few years years ago over lockdown. I had a lot of down time and worked on teaching myself web development full time 5 days a week for about a year. I was then able to land a job at a FAANG company through an apprenticeship scheme that they offer in the UK (I'm not sure if these kinds of schemes are available in the US) where I stayed for a year and a half and I am now working for a startup in a position I found through connections I made at my previous job. At the time I did have other offers for non-apprenticeship roles at other companies so don't let the absence of apprenticeships put you off if they aren't on offer in the US. The job market was definitely better when I was applying for my first job so the process might be more drawn out now. The main resource I used for self teaching was The Odin Project (https://www.theodinproject.com/). I also did a batch at The Recurse Center (https://www.recurse.com/) which was a great experience in general, especially for getting some hands on time working on projects with other people. I would say be curious, reach out to people who are working on things you find interesting to ask them for a chat and just persevere with the applications as you will definitely get a lot of rejections.

One more thing (might be UK specific as well) but I would check to see if there are any government funded bootcamps you might be able to get a place on. I know multiple people in the UK who got the job center to pay for them to do a bootcamp while they were on universal credit and now work in the industry.

So I have been learning how to code and broadly development since 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdowns, beginning with the classic triple threat of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, adding into the mix a dash of Python and since returning to live in France 2022 have committed to The Odin Project web-development program and happily began my full time formal learning with Ada Tech School in 2023. Now the search for my 12-month-long apprenticeship (Alternance, en français) begins, as well as continuing my self-study and side-projects.

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I did some traveling around the western US in late 2022 to take stock of where my life was and where I was going. During that time I decided that I would go all-in with my coding education, and committed to learning the remaining material listed on those bootcamp syllabi that I had not yet studied – namely, connecting the pieces of the MERN stack; learning about automated testing and data structures & algorithms; and studying development paradigms & methodologies like Agile, Scrum & Kanban, and OOP design patterns & principles – as well as continue to develop my programming fundamentals on platforms like Leetcode and Codewars.

My first encounter with regular expressions was in a solution for a coding problem on Codewars, specifically Count the smiley faces! Which asks you to count the number of smiley faces in a given array but the catch is each smiley can have 1 of 2 kinds of eyes (: or ;), may or may not have a nose represented by 1 of 2 symbols (- or ~), and 1 of 2 symbols (D or ) ) for the smile. In total there are 12 different combinations that are a valid smiley. I, being the young and naive programmer I was, hard coded all 12 of those faces and checked every element against that list. And it worked! But the top solution included some strange syntax that I had never seen before

Embrace Challenges: Challenge yourself with platforms like Exercism and Codewars that offer a wide range of coding challenges of varying difficulty levels. Additionally, consider exploring niche topics through courses on platforms like Coursera and edX.

@OP DO NOT go on the path of perfecting it and parting with your time and money. Go with Jake Vanderplas's whirlwind tour of python whirlwind tour of python to get some basics and then jump into the river codewars and swim upstream daily and religiously until you reach to katas level 5. You will be good to go. My personal experience.

Codewars: Codewars

You can try Codewars, they have a diverse range of practice problems(Cryptography, Data Science, etc.). Basically if you wanna get good in a programming language, you have to work on a lot of projects and practice problems.

Codewars is a good platform. Here you can practice code kata's daily in your preferred programming language. Link: https://www.codewars.com/

If you're looking for something that is closer to a combat style game you could try https://www.codewars.com/