Post Cohort Todo List

Preface

Now that you've completed your General Assembly Cohort, the mission to find your first role in the tech industry begins. You should allocate the hours you'll been dedicating to class to this mission.

Work on Skills As A JS Developer and Overall Programmer

Concepts You Should Know How to Describe ( Google and Stack Overflow) look up what each of these things are as a way to continue to learn over the next 100 days

Advice from your Outcomes Coach Should always be followed as they present it, below is just tips based on my experience, I do not have the same expertise as your career coach on how to structure your search

My recommendation is to split this time:

  • 25% Doing Code Challenges
  • 25% Learning New Tech or Solidifying Foundation
  • 25% Sending Out Job Application (2 SOLID Applications per hour)
  • 25% Networking and Branding

General Assembly Logo

Code. Every. Day.

The idea here is consistency. If you can commit to coding for at least one hour every day, you will be an expert in your craft within five years. Not just good, an expert. You've heard us say it before, it's about the reps. The more time you spend coding, the faster you will gain that deeper understanding.

There are many thousands of people just like you that want to learn software development and want to make the transition into tech. All of the material that we have shown you is available for free somewhere on the internet. People come to General Assembly for the structure and the discipline.

Up to this point, you have had your instructors and your peers to lean on, on an almost every day basis. Soon this course will be over and you will have to find ways to keep yourself focused and motivated outside of the classroom atmosphere while you are on the job hunt.

We've designed this outline to help you stay focused and to help you get your name out there in the tech industry. Everyone starts somewhere, and if you don't already have an online presence in tech, then you're about to.

Putting yourself out there feels uneasy, especially when you are getting started. We are going to take the first step to building our network so you have momentum upon leaving the course.

100 Days of Code if your hungry for a challenge and want to get better

  • 100 Days of Code is a challenge for software developers and a movement.
  • Developers who commit to this challenge are committing to coding for at least one hour for the next one hundred days.
  • After doing something coding related - solving a challenge on CodeWars, teaching yourself something new, completing a tutorial, building your own project, or contributing to open source - you are going to tweet about it on Twitter.
  • Today is day one of your challenge. With this you commit every day to practicing, networking, and building your brand

GitHub Heat Map

  • You may have noticed your Heat Map lighting up on days where you have made at least one commit.
  • We're going to make sure our GitHub's are painted green

Instructions

  1. Make an account on Twitter for your presence in tech. This will serve as a professional account that you can and should add to your resume.
  2. For now, you do not have to add a profile picture, but you should have your handle include your name. Ex: jdoe_codes
  3. Follow popular topics in programming like JS, React, Node, Python, etc.
  4. Follow as many people in the space as you can find. The idea is to expose your feed to as many voices in tech as possible. Your feed will connect you to even more people and topics to follow.
  5. Next, follow the other people in your breakout room. Then follow everyone in the class. This is your first network in tech and as you all branch off and excel in your careers you will want to stay connected.
  6. Now, go to your personal GitHub and make a new repository named code-every-day. Clone it and open it in your text editor
  7. Complete a challenge on Codewars, LeetCode or Hacker Rank. Give yourself an easy win so you can post about it on Twitter. Make another file in your repo where you can solve the coding challenge and make a commit. Then add your success to a log.md to track your days and progress through the challenge.
  8. Push your work to your GitHub and Tweet about your progress using the hashtags #100DaysOfCode and #codeEveryDay. This will make your post visible to anyone else searching the challenge and will get more eyes on your post.

Today, you will tweet that you have accepted the #100DaysOfCode challenge, and every day for the rest of the 100 you will document one thing that you learned or worked on that day and add Arthur as an accountability partner.

Doing Code Challenges

You can do coding challenges at the following places:

Advice:

  • Fork My AlgoCasts Repo and keep commiting your answers to challenges there and make pull requests to add them to my repo, this will improve your Github heat map
  • organize your answers into the repo, to help build your github commit history and to make easy employers to see your practice
  • have a scratch file open to try out ideas or test out things you want to try in isolation before applying it to the challenge
  • Don't hesitate to read langauge documentation to get more depth about something unclear
  • Add comments that explain your logic, so people who review your practice can appreciate your thought process
  • Don't rush to do hard coding challenges, often the simplest ones will actually be some of those fruitful ones

Computer Science and Assessments

Take assessments on LinkedIn and TripleByte.com, top scores get filtered to employers as top picks. They can be taken multiple times so take an assessment and take notes of topics you may want to review for future attempts.

What is TripleByte

Triplebyte is the engineering industry's largest directory of skilled, technically-assessed software engineers. They connect companies with tens of thousands of engineers who are actively seeking or open to learning about new opportunities. Engineers come to them because they help streamline their job search and certify their abilities. Employers come to them because they make their sourcing easier and more effective by pre-screening candidates and providing quick ways to connect with talented engineers, including those from underrepresented groups.

How does TripleByte Assess Engineers

Engineers complete various adaptive online quizzes (most quizzes are multiple-choice and some require actually writing code). Trained on over 300,000 engineers, the Triplebyte evaluation uses machine learning to identify talented candidates.

We've developed a set of questions and a well-defined rubric to ensure standardization across candidate scoring. The quizzes ask each candidate different questions from our large pool of potential questions, based on where they have shown strength and weakness. By doing this we are able to get more accurate results in a shorter amount of time. The statistical model we use for our quiz (item response theory) is similar to what is behind the GRE and GMAT tests.

Most of the quiz questions involve looking at blocks of code and answering questions about them (finding bugs and predicting behavior). Some questions test specific knowledge.

Sample TripleByte Candidate Profile

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How will we use TripleByte

  1. You will take 3-5 TripleByte tests
  2. TripleByte will evaluate your performance and let us know what percentile your performance sits
  3. Based on your performance we will provide you with additional resources to hone in on your skills
  4. Each test takes 1 hour, you will work on the test, take a 30 minute break then take the next until done.

Which tests will we take

  1. Javascript Knowledge which asseses your knowledge of JS the language as well as the Node JS ecosystem
  2. Front End Development which asseses your knowledge of Front End Technologies and handling APIs
  3. Backend on Backend Development
  4. General Coding Logic, on debugging and reading code.
  5. React which asseses your knowledge of React and the ecosystem around react

Get started here: https://triplebyte.com/wt/seventh-ave/start/2aRsN2eoHp4/c3108

If You Want to Be a Frontend Dev Take The front end Test as well

If You Want to Be a Backend Dev Take the backend

If You Want to be both take both

Level 2 or Higher is Passing Level 3 is very very high for an early career developer

Learning New Tech or Solidifying Foundation

Bottom Line, you want a solid foundation in Javascript, so the first thing everyone should do post cohort is review and reinforce their javascript fundamentals by completing this freecodeacademy course.

Other Great Free Courses to Expand Skills:

As you learn things, build small projects to practice what you learned and deploy them!

Learning New Languages

The Repository below has the lessons and the build to learn how to build a full crud API in 8 Languages!

Practicing Interview Questions

These repos have loads of potential interview questions of varying difficult. Use them to help identify things you should research and learn about so you can discuss them if they come up during an interview.

Bonus Tips on Freelancing

A Powerful Combination for Freelancing is the Headless CMS + Static Site Generator Combo (The JAM Stack).

LIST OF HEADLESS CMS: Headless CMS provides a GUI create content that is then provided to your frontend via a REST or GraphQL API

Static Site Generators They pull information from different sources like a Headless CMS or your own custom API, and use your code written in your favorite frontend framework to generate a static HTML/CSS/JS web page that is fast, secure and better for SEO.

  • Gatsby(React)
  • NextJS(React)
  • Astro(React/Svelte/Vue)
  • JungleJS(Svelte)
  • SvelteKit(Svelte)
  • ElderJS(Svelte)
  • Gridsome(Vue)
  • Nuxt(Vue)
  • Scully(Angular)
  • Eleventy (EJS, Handlebars, Pug, Liquid)
  • Remix(React)
  • For more checkout JAMStack.org

So by Pairing a Headless CMS with a SSG, you can give your client a GUI dashboard they can manage their website but make it fast, low cost, secure and amazing for SEO by statically generating the output. A must learn for freelancing.

BONUS Certifications

Additional Ceritifications will only make you more marketable and improve your skill set, here is a list of some popular certifications.