At the beginning of 2017 I had never written a line of code. unless you count HTML when I was 15(many years ago). I work and have built a career in a completely unrelated industry, and did not complete a bachelor's degree as my work has been based on certifications and experience. This career is rewarding, but unstable by its nature and I wanted to create a 'Plan B' for myself and started learning Javascript in about March. I was also inspired after building my own keyboards (do not go if you value your wallet r/mechanicalkeyboards) to understand more about programming in general.

Whatever the circumstance that led me to it, I started at codecademy(this was earlier this year and the new materials they just released are much better). I finished their Javascript portion and at the end felt like I had just learned to talk about javascript, and nothing about how to actually write it in a practical sense. I then found freeCodeCamp.com, they have been my primary learning source and I've completed their "Front End Development Certificate". This was my daily practice for the past few months - up at 6, coding for two-three hours, eat, two to three more hours of coding, then off to work in the evening, weekends included. Along with that program I took courses from Wes Bos, I high recommend his 30 days of javascript course, easy enough to follow along and even if you don't understand what is going on, you'll learn a ton. I also took a couple of courses through Stanford Lagunita, their cs101 just so I could show i'm not a luddite trying to break into the industry, and their JSON data structures mini course. I started a couple of Udemy courses but never felt the need to complete them as they were very slow, and I didn't really get that much from them, so I won't name them. Once I felt like I could write some code and build something from scratch in javascript (and react thanks to wes's great introductory course) I started to just throw my name out there, as I really need to find work.

The process of filling out applications is just a crap shoot, I actually found a lot of education, recruitment, and placement(temp) agencies posing at companies looking for developers. They're not worth my time if they can't be up front about who they are and what they actually offer. What I found that worked to get me the position Im starting tomorrow is showing up, I went to meetups, and if I didn't get a response from a company I applied to, I stopped by. Showing up is something I'm comfortable with as I feel I present well in person and dont have the strong experience or resume I would like to.

I watched a lot of youtube videos on finding your first developer job and the theme was clear, 'You know nothingvery little and have no experience, so your asset is passion and aptitude'. That's the theory I went with and now I'm looking forward to learning a full stack starting tomorrow! I've got so much more to learn- apollo, auth0, mongoDB, graphQL, and deeper React than i have experience with. While I'm intimidated, I actually feel really confident that if I learned this much in a few months, I can get up to speed and be useful in some way quickly. This is a small startup taking me on is a risk they are aware of, but I take it as a compliment, they have some belief in my abilities(which I in no way inflated, Don't ever lie or inflate your abilities on a resume/application).

tldr:worked to learn from scratch, now i'm starting a developer position tomorrow.

advice- get out there, show up, be honest about your abilities and what you want from your first position.

edit- any advice from more experienced devs would be appreciated, I'm also happy to comment more if anyone has specific questions.

I was learning javascript and i come across the concept promise ad observables. I read the documentation watch the tutorial but I don't understand the what is the purpose of promises.
I am not able to relate promises concept to a real-life problem. Can someone please explain to me the concept promises with real-life example?

YouTube is full of tutorials and beginner projects. Do you know any videos or youtube channels where a senior dev simply starts working on some project and explains why he/she chose to write something this way, explain why this method is more effficient than the other?

Top Projects in 2018
https://blog.github.com/2018-12-13-new-open-source-projects/

I'm writing this just to thank all of you who helped with this project, I'd like to thanks all of the 44 contributors that have contributed to the project, and for all of those who have made some constructive feedback! Thanks y'all!

I'm really proud of this project and really glad of the huge feedback that I've been receiving for the last months.

If you don't know the project yet, I'd really recommend it for all of those who want to learn more about JavaScript. If you want to contribute to the project, or just give a feedback, please feel free to do:

33 concepts every JavaScript developer should know
https://github.com/leonardomso/33-js-concepts