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I want to become FullStack dev from Mechanical designer, pls help
6 points by tor10 1480 days ago
I am a full time mechanical designer and want to change my field. I have a good knowledge of html and basic in css. I come to finalize these two courses to go through, but still confused which one should I go with ?

I can afford both courses, but my concern is which course is much better to start with.

1. https://www.udemy.com/course/the-web-developer-bootcamp/ 2. https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-web-development-bootcamp/

Any help would be appreciated. I am located in North America, if that makes any difference. I am good with self study. I have learned SolidWorks, Keyshot and many more platform by self learning.

4 comments

Take what I say with a grain of salt because I'm not an industry veteran but I think a large part of fullstack is being able to transfer general skills across different areas and technologies (even outside of web development). So learning programming in general in any language that sounds good to you would probably be a good start.

As to what language to choose, I think every language has some quirks that will throw you off as a beginner. OOP languages (like Java or C#) used to be the classic first languages in courses but nowadays I think OOP is not as "critical" anymore. So something like Python or JavaScript would also work. A large online community helps, even if most of the advice online is terrible. (I read a lot of StackOverflow and random blogs/forums in addition to my classes at school when I learnt programming.)

My 2 cents, don't aim for full stack from the start. Decent full stack engineers take many many years to become truly full stack, and even then they'll still have an area of specialty.

I've seen people calling themselves full stack but in reality they don't even have an area they know well and so they are just weak across the board which makes it hard to even give them a chance. Pick an area, spend your time there first and once you are fairly solid there you can start branching into more parts of the stack. I do think it is smart to branch wide across many areas, but you need some depth in an area first to help you land a job and be productive for a team.

Okay, yeah you're right. I am not gonna become fullstack right away, but this course will at least provide me a descend knowledge about web-dev. And this way I can build portfolio which will be helpful to get me at least junior position, because, see I am completely new in the field.
If you have the time and money i'd suggest a CS masters through a reputable university, right now the entry level job market is completely saturated with bootcamp grads flooding every job opening with 1000's of resumes and application. It's going to be really hard to compete for entry level role.
I am not in position to spend that much amount for University and time for masters. That is why I am going through partTime self-learning. You're right tho.
I didn't work them myself, but there are a lot of online options that look good. https://fullstackopen.com/en/ seems like a solid choice to me.
"Participants are expected to have good programming skills, basic knowledge of web programming and databases, and to know the basics of working with the Git version-control system." that's where I am not compatible. I know little bit of HTML and css, that's it.
> that's where I am not compatible.

Depends where your confidence is at; but I'd encourage your confidence to outpace where you perceive your skills to be relative to others.

For a lot of programming, it's pretty easy to monkey-see-monkey-do.. I mean, to look at some example that's close to what you want, and try to get it to what you want.

The 'programming loop' is: when you face a problem, search for whatever error message you got (or what you're trying to do), and then click on the first link which is most likely StackOverflow.

You might as well try some online course like that. Maybe it ends up being too difficult for you. Try find a simpler course.