Employment

I don't have a degree and never went to college. I work as a full-time "Web Application Developer" at Spherexx. To get my job, I simply built several projects in different languages with different frameworks as examples of what I can do. It's difficult to get your foot in the door without a degree and/or any work experience; however, I also approached friends and family about building websites (free of charge) for their businesses to build my portfolio.

After a few simple tests and an interview, I began work as a developer about a year ago. Prior to this job, I'd been working with HTML, CSS, JS, Ruby, Rails, and PHP off and on for years.

Before this, I was a paramedic for 8 years.

Want to know what kind of projects to build? Look at job postings and see which technologies are "hot" in your location. Then build simple things with those technologies.

Technologies I used daily:

• HTML
• CSS (Sass)
• JS (Typescript)
• Classic ASP (unfortunate, but true)
• SQL
• C# (with .Net, mostly in MVC projects)
• Gulp (and related gulp-packages for building)
• Node
• Git
• Php (I'm the only one with wordpress experience... Wish I'd left that off my resume)

I'm sure there's more that I've forgotten, but there's a few examples.

your a saint, thank you

Apologies for jumping on your thread here Robert,

This kinda ties into a question I was about to post! Jacob, as you got into your career based on portfolio and application rather than qualifications as such, do you believe under a pro subscription I can learn enough to build a portfolio myself and push for employment with a front end development position?

I've searched all over for various courses which range rather wildly in price, I have limited resource at the moment so affording a tech degree is simply out of the question for me right now, but so far this pro subscription feels like a nice balance for me, any input would be greatly appreciated.

again, sorry for jumping on another thread with this... :)

Thanks for the reply, thats great news!

I've only recently joined Treehouse but I've made a start on the front end development track, the plan was to reach the end of this track and top it off with any other modules relating to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Once I felt I had a solid understanding I was planning to put it into practice with either offering my services for free to friends or like you have suggested, finding other sites and trying to replicate them(thanks for the link, bookmarked ready for the future!).

any other advice or strategies would be welcomed, I am hopeful to trying to secure an employed position over the next 12 months if possible.

The long term is Full stack development, probably leaning towards PHP and MySQL as my next areas to work on.

Many thanks!

Seems were in the same boat Daniel lol Good luck and if I ever come across any useful tips regarding finding a job in this field in my travels, Ill be sure to let you know.

• and Iam glad you jumped in the thread

Thanks Robert,

Likewise, so far my TreeHouse experience has been very positive, hoping to carry this momentum forward now, I'll share any useful info I may come across regarding our situation also!

Robert the suggestion of creating a portfolio for your work is my exact approach. I have a website to document my learning experience with the front end track. Also, I will use Github as another portfolio as well. Keep up the work and best of luck to you!