Don’t go to school. DON’T GO TO SCHOOL. You will go many thousands of dollars into debt. Worse, you will not be taught how to program. Worst, you will pick up the bad habits and foolish ideologies of your washed up professors.
Don’t waste your time on “code schools” or “bootcamps” or any such nonsense. You learn a few dozen buzzwords and not much else. The “job guarantee” is a lie. You will end up as a glorified intern at a sweatshop. I know. I was a manager (by attrition) at one of them. The code school graduates couldn’t even write a for loop unsupervised (no kidding). Applicants fresh out of these bootcamps didn’t even know basic terminology.
The primary skill of a programmer is learning. If you can’t learn under your own direction you won’t make it in the industry. The internet is full of tutorials and documentation for every programming language and framework ever made. For free. Study and code for several hours every night and at least one whole day per weekend. Do this diligently for six months and you might be ready to apply to the lowest entry level job. Don’t do internships. If you work, get paid. If nobody is willing to pay you, study harder on your own.
Your Github profile is everything. Your resume might as well be a description of your interesting Github repos. Nobody cares if you have a degree or a certificate or a participation award. All they care about is whether you can finish their projects and make them money. Why would a company hire you except to make money? Show them you can handle projects through your Github profile.
(As a side note, don’t use BitBucket. It makes you look like a weirdo, like you have no roots in the larger culture or community.)
Make sure those green activity squares look nice. I’m skeptical of self-taught applicants when I see a handful of squares over the past year. Do they not know to “commit early, commit often”? Do they understand the point and purpose of revision control? Of remote backups? Or do they lack the innate interest in programming? Perhaps they’re lazy. Perhaps the code is just lifted off some old site somewhere. It doesn’t look good from any angle. You don’t have to commit every day. You can have a few weeks empty. But the sprints of activity should be natural looking and frequent. The commit comments should be concise. Show them you have work ethic.
The last part is that you should run Linux. Natively. Preferably Ubuntu. Know how to use it and how to configure it. Know how to solve problems and set up application stacks. Most of the web is running on Linux and Ubuntu is most common. Startups can’t afford dedicated system administrators. Several of my development jobs were attained in no small part to being able to administrate the Linux servers when needed.
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