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Beginner looking for a community

Maru on March 03, 2021

Hi! I've been learning web programming on my own for almost a year. It has been a very interesting journey, filled with ups and downs, especially b...
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Thomas Sjögren

Welcome!

First: It’s awesome that you been teaching it by yourself. There are many great sources of information and it can be quite overwhelming. FCC is a great place to start. Great job.

Second: Super good idea to reach out to connect with other beginners. Finding people to talk about development, code but also life is very valuable.

Never stop learning!

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Maru

Thank you for your kind words, it means a lot to me. Yes, I truly think interacting with other people will help me boost my learning process and it also feels great to be part of a community

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Thomas Sjögren

Totally. One thing is reading, studying and learning by yourself but to have fellow developers to discuss problems, concepts and ideas with.

I’ve work quite a lot as the only front end/UX developer and having a community to bounce of has helped me a lot.

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Maru

I agree and it's actually a very interesting topic.

Nowadays being able to learn things on your own is a great skill but most people don't mention how lonely it can get, that is why I really appreciate platforms like this.

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Karen Poveda L.

Hey Maru, I've been checking the projects on your second post. Very inspiring. I'm a beginner myself and just like you I'm looking for other developers to connect, share and go through this journey together. I'd love to chat if you're interested. Saludos desde Colombia.

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Maru

Hola Karen! Thank you for checking my post about the projects I built.

And sure! Let's chat ☺️

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Karen Poveda L.

I'm always looking for ideas and your post was of great help.

Where could I contact you?

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Maru

Send me a DM on Twitter @marulucenat 👋

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Karen Poveda L.

I followed you but there's not an option to DM you 🤔

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Maru

Whoops, currently fixing that

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Pachi 🥑

Hello and Welcome, I am Pachi!
I used to be a junior web developer and now I work with developer relations, but I consider myself a beginner in programming.
I was in the same spot you are 1 year ago.
Let's connect :)

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Maru

Hi Pachi, nice to meet you! Thank you so much for your comment, I would love to connect with you :)

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Neha

Welcome! Great to meet you! dev.to and community.codenewbie.org are great communities to share your journey and read about the journeys of others. I look forward to hearing about your experience with programming!

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Maru

That's awesome!! Thank you, I really appreciate it.

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Maru

Hi Court! Thank you for sharing your experience with me, it's always interesting to learn how others discovered their love for coding.

I will be reading your blog post and definitely check Code First Girls 💙

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Prince-Alarming

Hi Maru, congrats on the Responsive Web Design Certification. I'm at the same site doing the same thing. On the cusp of getting my Responsive Certification too. This site is a great way to connect with like minded. It also offers more in the way of challenges. There's a thread about learning javascript (I think the basic fundamentals of it) in 30 days. Try the tag #javascript

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Maru

Hi! It's been great to connect with other students at freeCodeCamp. Good luck with the projects, they are really fun 😊 I would love to check them out

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Prince-Alarming

Have like 50 or so lessons left in CSS 3, then the 4 things for my Responsive web cert. Am going to refresh from HTML 5 just to utilize all I've learned.

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Prince-Alarming

Correction 5 projects!

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Gracie Gregory (she/her)

Hi Maru! DEV is a great place for you! We're happy you're here. I also invite you to check out the dedicated CodeNewbie Community — a home for early-career programmers and people learning to code ❤️

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Andrei Dascalu • Edited

Well, you're definitely in the right place. Plenty of communities for all kinds and shapes of development. Backend, front-end, pragmatic, academic :)

By the way, how is the development market in Chile?

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Maru

Thanks! I'm glad I found it.

I've seen a lot of job offerings here for developers, however most of them ask for 5+ years of experience which is a bit frustrating. Also, I've mostly seen opportunities for Back-End devs but maybe I'm not looking properly.

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Rishiraj Purohit

You are already going towards certificates which is a good thing, adding a portfolio will be a great help. A tip for searching jobs, it might sound very naive, but try to figure out the name of the role you want. Some total, might be irrelevant guesses, junior web developer, web developer trainee or junior frontend developer, anor use the filters available like experience on various sites like stack overflow jobs, Google jobs , Glassdoor, angel.co, remote work, and LinkedIn.

I hope you find something you like.

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Maru

Oh that is something I'm struggling with, defining my role(s). Mostly because I would like to include other skills I have but still make my resume related to IT, it's like I can't seen to find the correct words...

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Christopher Reeve

Hello Maru! i'm also new to this dev.to community
been coding for a great 7 years but i'm all alone that 7 years.
been learning so many programming and ended up becoming laravel fullstack developer now.
nice to know you! :)

ps : Good luck on your journey! because learning something in web programming is never ended :D

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Nimit Savant

Hey @Maru, Nimit this side. Starting to code and not finding a team or group of people equally invested in developing something sometimes makes you lonely and demotivates you a lot. I understand this because I go through this every day. But now since I've got a community of hack club nuv where share hacks and makes things together. If you feel lonely while adding scripts to your HTML file, ping me I'll send you the discord link.

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Maru

Thank you for the recommendation, I'm happy you found a community!🙌

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Rishiraj Purohit

Hello and welcome to programming, I can completely relate to what you felt in the beginning because of so much information/guides out there , telling you what's important and what not.

FreeCodeCamp is a great place to start, I see you did we design and you are moving towards js, which signals you might be interested in web development. I will not say frontend or backend because you haven't fully tried it yet.

One thing that helped me aquire relevant skills, confidence while having fun and continuous motivation was thinking about what I want to make. Trying to make something that you can show to others will means you'll want it to be completed.

I wanted to make a website when I started to share some content with friends, I did html and css but it didn't look good on mobile and that told me about css percentage width, when that started failing, I learned media queries. I would have never learned media queries or remembered them if it wasn't for the website. I just wanted it to look good on mobile.

So I would advice you to think of something simple that you will love to make and share with friends , or share with us. While you make it you'll automatically figure out what you need to learn and what is not relevant at the point. When you face a problem, always remember, you might not be the first one to face this problem, someone else might have faced it too, so there must be questions and answers all over the web, you just need to search and you will find many solutions and one will work for you.

This also will validate your learnings, make a portfolio which will be a plus during interviews and having something tangible, usable out there will be worth all the hard work and late nights you spent finishing it. There is no rush in the beginning, enjoy it , you don't even need to remember everything by heart but just the times when it will be useful and then you can just search the syntax or implementation.

So congratulations on starting, completing a certificate and finding your path.
Congratulations on joining dev and posting here, and best of luck for all the things you make in future. I can't wait to see what you post here.

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Maru • Edited

Wow, thank you so much for taking the time to write this comment and for sharing your experience with me.

I can relate to what you say about building something you like and showing it to friends and family, it is very exciting to finish a project, seeing how others interact with it and receiving feedback. And yes! While building something you learn a lot, especially when you try to be creative and don't know how to make your idea come to life 😅

Again, thank you for your recommendations, I hope you have a good day!

Edit: I posted my experience on building projects, it would be nice if you could check it out :) dev.to/marulucenat/working-on-my-f...

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erica (she/her)

You're in the right place! DEV is super beginner friendly, and there are many folks here who are self taught.

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Maru

Thank you! I'm very happy to be here :)

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Kieran Roberts

Welcome to the community Maru! I was in a similar position to you a month ago. I have been learning for the past year and recently started reaching out to others and engaging with the community and it has been great 😃. The learner developer community on Twitter is great with people helping and encouraging each other. Check out the #100DaysOfCode. Good luck with your journey!

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Maru

Thank you for sharing your experience with me! It's great to know there is also a great community on Twitter, I will check it out 🤓

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Saumya Nayak

Yeah I have also realized that being in a community is great, you just share when u get stuck and people are always helping each other .

And as you are using freecodecamp I just found out their discord server :
discord.gg/KVUmVXA .

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Dan Silcox

Welcome to DEV - if you're after community you're in the right place; there are people from all different backgrounds, skill levels and parts of the world - all with different interests but largely with the same mindset of wanting to learn, grow, help each other and ultimately make cool stuff!

Congrats on completing the certification and all the best for the future.

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Maru

Thanks a lot! I truly feel like I'm on the right place 🤓

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Jonathan Fielding

Welcome,

Great job teaching yourself, majority of what I learned over the years was self-taught so I can definitely appreciate when someone is taking time to teach themselves to code.

Always remember in the tech community your never alone, there's always someone happy to help. Also, you might want to check out communities like Codebar which put on workshops with the sole purpose of connecting you to people who can help you if you get stuck

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Maru

Thank you very much for your comment.

That is something I definitely need to remind myself, I feel like sometimes we don't seek help because we don't want to look "dumb" but that's a very silly and unproductive thought.

I will check Codebar, it looks very nice :)

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dinesh0191

Another beginner in the house 🤗
Hello guys I'm Dinesh from India, started learning programming on my own for the past 8 months.
As of today, I have a decent knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
And currently enjoying learning React.

Good to see alike people.

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Alexandr Rešetňak

Hello! My name is Alex. I started learning web development by myself 4 years ago.
Now Im working in software development company where Im working on world wide product used by minions of users every single day.

Your post is exactly what I feed! Developer journey is lonely. I have struggled a lot with no friends or contacts.

I would like to connect If you wanted to!
Have a great day and keep learning and creating a new stuff!

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Maru

Hello Alex! It feels good to know people who are experiencing the same so I'm happy I shared my thoughts.

And sure, let's connect 🤓

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Huseyin Simsek

Yeah. I think so. Community is very important. Twitter is a very important place for the community. I think you should share what you do. At a time, I shared a to-do list project but not have a good UI. However, some experienced developers answer me. They give me some advice. So I think that sharing information is important :)

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Maru

I agree. At first I was a bit ashamed of sharing my work but it's something I definitely have to start doing!

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Sean Ormiston • Edited

Hi Maru!
First off, props to having the courage to introduce yourself. Dev.to is definitely a fine community, and sometimes intimidating by virtue of the expertise here. Although....that is the point!

I am a somewhat recent bootcamp graduate who has been looking for the kind of "all-in-this-togetherness" of a group of self-starters -- the experience I had at General Assembly.

I warmly and highly recommend you check out mintbean.io/ . Especially, join the discord server (link at bottom of page.) It's a very well-balanced server --- not too big, not too small, many self-learners, and very principally javascript. If you're interested in modern javascript frameworks (definitely a big deal in becoming a frontend developer -- React, especially, but also Vue and Angular) then this is a great place. Mintbean also launches hackathons every week, which can be done solo or in teams of 3. A lot of learning happens in a hackathon, but if it ever becomes overwhelming, there is no penalty or consequence. Just try again, whenever you want.

If you come through there, say hi, and let me know what you're working on! I'm happy to help.

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Maru

Hi Sean!

At first I was hesitant to introduce myself over here, now I'm happy I did!
Thank you very much for the recommendation, I will definitely check that out :)

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KowalewskiPawel

Hi Maru! I am also new here, started my journey with FCC over a year ago still going further currently I am about to finish Node.js part. I am not sure where will this journey take us, but the point is to enjoy the journey itself.

Good luck and keep going!

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Maru

Yay! Another person from FCC :)

I agree, it's very important to enjoy the journey, even when things get too overwhelming

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Chittoji Murali Sree Krishna • Edited

Welcome Maru

Well thats good you have started with freecodecamp, but once you complete those all certifications, just try these frontend mentor challenge,

dev.to/frontendmentor/16-front-end...

if you already did these projects then ignore, if not just try those, you can also get a better options in frontend mentor with subscribtion, but you can do these projects by free,

and if you need any help or a doubt or stuck any-where, there is a youtuber named
KEVIN POWELL,
he might help you with those designs and stuff,

if you need more challenges i can help with that

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Maru

Oh great! I was actually looking for some project ideas to work on. Thank you for the recommendations 🤓

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Riday • Edited

Hello. Congratulations on taking your first step in your new journey! Hope you achieve great things!

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muzammilaalpha

Good one, keep sharing!

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E.R. Nurwijayadi

I don't know about english community.

I have list my local community here:
🕷 t.me/catatan_tersemat/19

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Atulit Anand

Lol I was just waiting for someone to write this article.
Cheers mate! Have a great day.

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blaquebeardcoder

👋🏾Welcome! The Dev.to community is UH-MAZING, and I hope that you feel the love for code newbies and beginners!

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Tobi Salau

Hi! Seems we're in similar situations lol. I am currently on the javascript part of fcc after a few months of self learning. #codenewbie 😁

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Maru

Hello! That's so cool, I would love to know about your experience too :D

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Amanda Giannelli • Edited

Welcome! I highly recommend joining Twitter, if you haven't already! For me, it has been a great resource for help & inspiration. Connect with me! @giannellitech

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Maru

Thank you! Yes, I recently started using Twitter (after several months) and it also has been a very awesome source of inspiration 😊

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🚩 Atul Prajapati 🇮🇳

Welcome 🙏 Maru, I am also learning and sharing my knowledge in this community. Currently I am learning CSS variables 🔥

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Lorenzo • Edited

Hello and welcome!
If you want you can write me in private

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Lee Wynne

Hey there! I remember doing the same and getting confused between a class in html, vs a class in Ruby and JavaScript (front end). Keep going, things click into place over time 😎

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Coderslang: Become a Software Engineer

Welcome, Maru!

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Maru

Muchas gracias por tu comentario y por la recomendación, pasaré a visitarlos 😊

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tankerguy1917

Hello Maru. I am also self taught, but I focus more on game development than web design. I just wanted to say hi, and that if I can help you in anyway on your journey, I'd be happy to help :)

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Ahmed Hafiz

On your own. 🥳👏👏 Great

How about Twitter? I see a lot of communities in discord ( mostly found from Twitter). But it ain't as good as tweets.

Also, I'd like to follow you.