NullDrone

https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap/raw/master/img/frontend.png?year-2020-2
 
https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap/raw/master/img/backend.png?year-2020-2
 
https://roadmap.sh/roadmaps/react.png
 
Agree with this?

Thanks for that Robert i'm feeling quite a bit better now.

i am angry and annoyed. i went to discord to ask for help, i was ignored and ignored until i said a rude word then the users took note of me. Aparently they ignored me because im entitled and demanding. but also because i was in the wrong chatroom for that purpose (i was in more specific . technical chatroom as appose to more gerneral design support). 

I was trying to make it fully clear what my position is and what I am trying to achieve but that comes across as entitled.

im just at a point in life where i feel if i try to connect and reach out - i am rejected. if i work on my own in isolation(so to speak) the work loses purpose and meaning. 
i just wish i was normal, frig this life!
 
 

Pretty much when anyone has a response to something I say everyone likes it, but I'm not here to be liked

You should consider that a lot of professionals have their own lives to live — you don't know the struggles they go through on a day to day basis or how much free time they have.  I like to spend my free time with family and will lend a hand to those who I think will benefit from it.
I doubt people are not helping you due to some vision of competition, the people helping will be so far ahead they won't see you as competition it's more likely that they are busy or have other interests.   Maybe they have children who should always take priority over some random guy on the internet asking for help?

Not wanting to sound rude but you strike me as the type of person who'd pin your problems on other people rather than looking at it yourself.  I know I was one of those about a decade ago and decided that the only person who's gonna help me is me.  Funnily enough not long after I did receive help from people - they probably saw that I had a more positive outlook and was taking responsibility for my own shortcomings and trying to overcome them.

Hope this doesn't come across the wrong way.  I'm just feeling a little tired of people blaming for others when many of us engineers have had to work incredibly hard to get to where we are and people are assuming it's luck or we're just born with the ability.  We're not we just worked hour after hour and avoided procrastinating about how hard stuff is and how the world isn't fair.  In answer to that it's not.  So work hard and overcome that fact.

I'm the lead developer of a public facing JSON API at the company I work for, this API is currently having new endpoints and functionality added for an App we are developing for our customers, one of the new features is for our customers to upload videos to the app, these then goes through to our API, and we then send the videos to YouTube, and finally, we send an email or text to our customers customer informing them they've been sent a video, which is hosted on a page on the the customers website.
When I saw the brief, and even now when I'm writing the technical requirements for the endpoints, the format, body etc, I'm sat here thinking how the hell am I going to do this? I've got absolutley zero experience with processing videos though uploads, especially from a mobile device, chunking the video, loss of signal, very long (time wise) requests, but rather than saying to my manager I can't do this, I'm researching, creating proof of concepts, experimenting, until I'm comfortable I can do it, and I can do it right.

Truth to be told. there are actually sometimes very smart web developers who actually can say "we can do it, you can't, go **** yourself", but the reason they are smart  is because they're "nerds" and they are sitting in front of computer 24/7. This is also the reason they lack social communication skills and say a lot of uncalibrated stuff. They attract what they are and probably don't have good friends. No reason to pay attention to them, unless you wanna help them.
And sure, coding / web development is not easy. Some people are more predisposed to that than others, for many different reason., One of the reasons might be the time they've already invested in it, be it through college math or some hobby at their home PC.
But I've never seen a person who've put time into it and didn't succeed. I know several people personally who didn't show any sign of being talanted, and on the contratry, I thought it's just not for them. They've proved me wrong. At some point in time, they all had better jobs then I and few of them moved to a better city than I'm in now. I still think they are untalanted, but they just do it.
My point being that it doesn't matter if you're talanted at web development or not. If you put enough time and don't give up - you're very likely to succeed.
But that's only my perspective.

I've done alright and I'm not one of the intelligent ones, I got very average GCSE's a C at mathematics which is considered the main one for software…

Your statement "we can do it, you can't, go **** yourself" Is totally false, have you not considered that many people have busy lives to live and can't spend all their time solving problems for others? Moreover nobody learns from being given a solution.  It's loose-loose.

I certainly didn't pick things up right away, I often have to go over concepts a frustrating number of times before things start to click.  I think the difference is that I know this is necessary and very few professional engineers grasp new concepts right away - I don't let it get me down because I know each time I go over it I am getting closer to understanding.

In terms of money it's better than many professions that require degrees for entry level positions where as a dev you can earn better than graduate wages with a few months of concentrated effort.  Saying it can't be done is nonsense, I know plenty of people who have done this.

Companies are always going to want the best within a salary range, the best paying companies will be harder to get into, they will expect more, not just technically but soft skills too — You have to provide value.

I try to say this in the nicest way but if you have this sort of outlook on things and it surfaces during job interviews then you will struggle to get hired, even if your technical skills are sound.

Been down the pub today with a couple of mates one of whom is an electrical engineer. He's earning over £100K a year as a contractor. There is loads of work out there, you just need to be prepared to travel a bit. He said he started earning big money when he started contracting.

I do so because I disagree with what you are saying - this is based on personal experience having lived abroad in two countries.  I only know of one person who has successfully managed to land a well paid job abroad straight out of uni (At Microsoft) - and that's only because he was fortunate enough to be put on a placement with them in Reading and he happened to be one of the most talented students they had come across - out of the placement students only he was hired.
However this is the same guy I mentioned above who is unable to afford to buy a house because of the crazy prices in San Fransisco - high salaries usually equal expensive houses due to competition.

I don't want to be all doom and gloom but I was very negative about the UK before I left to work elsewhere, I had this idea that everywhere else was so much better - and in some respects they are but in others they are not.  It's funny how myself and the majority of people I know who moved back are doing better here than they were abroad.

Assuming you are under 30 you could try taking out a working holiday visa to try working in Australia, Canada and see for yourself.  This is what it took for me to realise I was being naive.

Fisicx makes a good point, why would they go through the rigamarole and expense of getting you a sponsorship visa + relocation package when they can hire somebody without all that.  They won't be hiring you straight from college or uni like you seem to think.  Maybe with some really solid experience.  Some devs get sponsored out there but rarely from uni and those are typically the top 1-2% of developers.

People here can get hired right out of uni, but you have to demonstrate that you can add value - this is the same in every country, nobody is going to hire you unless you can add more value - more value than your competition 

I still do both.

How do you know the projects I give you won’t be challenging? You have yet to even get started.

Try thinking out of the box, rather than doing what all the other applicants do, perhaps deliver your CV in person, or pay for a designer to make it stand out.  There are things you can do to draw some attention to your application.

Get involved in local dev meetups - word of mouth is very powerful and a personal recommendation will greatly enhance your chances.

You probably will need a short term job to allow you to earn while you study for your long term career, but I don't think web development is a good choice. You're right in saying you don't need to be passionate to get a job, but you will struggle, there's a lot to learn to get past the hobby developer stage, if you have no interest then I don't see how you will ever get over that hurdle. If you want to earn good money and level up quickly then work in finance.
 
If you get a group of developers together outside of work they will talk about code basically all night. I've met Paul, Robert, Lyndsey and Tim on here and the same was true then. It's that love for the job that pushes you to fix those annoying bugs, or through learning a complex topic. You'll also be less inclined to learn better design patterns and best practices, the quality of your code will suffer from a lack of interest.
 
If you want to do EE then focus in small steps to getting towards employment. If you're thinking of a fallback job already it shows you're doubting your own ability and commitment, and it's early to be doing that. Realistically, you won't be able to succeed at either trying to do two difficult careers at the same time.

The problem I have is that I have way too many interests, so far I've trained as an electrician, this year was at college for electrical engineering (which is more of a long term goal), last year I was doing web development but what I hated was that I was doing it at home without any pay, at least in college you get a qualification to prove what you've done.
 
I like the 3 things I've trained in, but would I be able to balance this into my life? I'm generally interested in anything along the lines technology, computing, coding, engineering etc. But because I'm not so specialist i'm always tied between multiple things.
 
Like I was close to get a web dev job but then got the opportunity to continue with my long term goal. The problem with getting a career as an electrical engineer is that it takes so long and the road is pretty depressing in the beginning, web development is quicker to get into - but i'm unsure how long it will last.
 
I'm thinking I could actually make use of this still if I do get a start in electrical engineering, for example websites that make a return for you without having to put in the time of actually having a job in this, if I had a job in EE i'd focus mostly on that.

I agree with Jack, to get good at web-development - the amount you need to learn to earn a decent salary is astronomical.
 
Almost all web developers also specialise in one, maybe two areas, even in this career alone if you were to study every night (after working for 8hrs) you will still have big gaps in your knowledge.
The competition especially at the junior end is very tough, more senior positions are easier to come by as many do not progress beyond the junior side, only those that are truly dedicated and passionate about what they do.
If you don't live and breathe code it will be a struggle. There are easier ways to earn money if that's your only goal with this career.
 
To expect to learn two simultaneously would be an immense undertaking, expect to have literally no social life or time for family.

You can do both. The salaried job bays the bills. The development work becomes fun money.

I'm not sure what area of EE your course covers, or what you want to specialise in, but the two can overlap. It's entirely possible for someone to have an electronics background that can also write the required software and maintain it. Quite a few developers play around with hardware and IOT devices in their spare time, having skills in both seems like a good career path, as there will be no shortage of electronic devices connected to the internet in the next 10 years. That said, it's a very tough career path, you'll likely have to learn languages that are close to the metal like C, C++ and Java, as well as have a solid understanding of both the electronics side and writing software, but it pays well.
 
I would recommend looking at ways you can practice both, even if it's just as a hobby. Maybe look at getting an Arduino board or a Nodebots Kit for Javascript and spend some weekends hacking on it. It should give you a better understanding of how the hardware and software side work together, and it will help to keep you writing code.

I would recommend you to find a design that you like and try to recreate it - use your own colour schemes and fonts - there is advice out there on good colour schemes. That X-files green is horrendous.
 
When I was interviewed for my role, my interviewer said to me, "your design skills are ****". My face dropped. And then he said we are not looking to employ another designer. I actually thought I was ok at design.
 
And finally, have you tried Free Code Camp? They take you through HTML, CSS and JavaScript - not as thoroughly as Code School, but where they excel is both in their algorithmic tests which really get you thinking about JavaScript, and also their projects - you will have to create a various sites, from a portfolio, to a weather forecasting app, to a calculator, to get their Front End Certificate. They estimate around 500 hours I think to get the certificate.

Go find a site that you think is visually stunning and recreate the layout on your own site.
 
But as Robert suggests, this is less important than demonstrating your skills. A simple well coded site that shows a good grasp of the basics will be sufficient. If you can layer on some examples of the more advanced coding you know then so much the better.
 
However, I'd stick with being an electrical engineer to earn a living and do the coding as a supplementary source of income.

Hello. It's been a while since I've been on this forum, and it does seem a bit quieter than it was. One of the main reasons that I haven't been on is that I've found my first web developer role.
 
My post is for two reasons. The first half is to thank everyone who has helped, especially those who have helped me directly when I had questions on building my own portfolio sites, but also those who helped indirectly - just reading the posts in this forum has been a help, especially the constructive criticism given to those who ask for their websites to be reviewed.
 
The second reason is hopefully to give hope and inspiration to anyone else trying to get their first role. It hasn't been easy - studying/coding 10+ hours almost every week outside of a full-time job (and trying to have a life).
 
And it isn't easy being a junior web developer - my particular problem is that my job requires CSS, Wordpress and PHP - the latter two of which I never used before starting! So it is a steep learning curve on the job, one which so far I am not quite meeting expectations.
 
So, so so much to learn. Some very frustrating days and I might not still have the job come Christmas. But the good days are very, very good, and I don't regret the career change in the slightest.
 
I've only just begun!

Do you recommend using gitkraken or sticking to git? It seems to me that gitkraken would be good for beginners that would need to pick up on all the commands, I know most, struggle to understand some like rebase etc. Sometimes I can find git a little bit confusing with advanced commands, and visualizing your branches can also be quite hard, so wouldn't it be better to use this, only reason I see in using cli's is for speed, but gui's can be useful for picking it up, I bet it's also simpler too.

The reason your probably feeling so overwhelmed and struggle to keep focussed is because your trying to learn everything possible in the space of a few months!
 
Your talking about node, PHP, SQL, html + css, angular and whatever else. You don't need to know everything to make some amazing stuff.
 
HTML + CSS will get you very far if you can get good, practice and show examples.
 
I have been doing dev for at least 5 years, 2 of them in an agency 3 just learning on the side.
 
My focus's are php, html and css. Yes, over the years I have learnt more in terms of moving to Laravel, SASS etc but I haven't looked at a Node tutorial in my life.
 
I can write Javascript okay but you know what, a lot of my projects include jQuery and I hardly delve deep into Angular etc (some Ionic work is an exception). I have been working at an agency for 2 years making some excellent things and Im not the best of the best who knows everything with a Uni degree and qualifications.
 
Just something to remember.

That's a very good point.