This article is going to be the first of a series on a topic dear to me: my career change in web development. I will explain my motivations and goals at the time, share the resources I used to learn web development and what specific training I underwent before securing my first job. After that, I’ll also write year-to-year summaries where I’ll offer an insight into what each new year felt to me, what I learned and how I gradually acquired more seniority and more self-confidence as a web developer.

Disclaimer

I started self-educating myself to web development around September, 2020 and was able to secure a backend developer position in October, 2022. This was all before GenAI tools such as ChatGPT became available. Unfortunately, as I am writing this article, AI has already been having a huge impact on our industry in the passed year. I believe it is now much harder to become a web developer nowadays, all the more as the tech sector is now mostly in shortage of highly experienced profiles.

I apologise in advance if some of the advice and information given in this series becomes obsolete due to the changes our sector has recently started to undergo. I still believe that the resources I’ll share throughout this series will remain relevant to some extent, and in addition, that highly motivated people with no particular background in programming can still succeed in such a career shift, provided that they practice and study enough.

So what’s my starting point?

In 2020, I found myself at a professional dead end. I’d started working in the south of France as an aerospace engineering subcontractor. However awesome that may sound, I was literally bored to death. From day one, I had been assigned tedious and repetitive tasks and had not even been properly onboarded. Though officially I was supposed to be a flight software testing engineer, I really just felt like an overpaid copy/paste expert working in a lonely room. I was young and eager to learn, but I was denied the opportunity to do anything more meaningful and fulfilling than the tasks I was assigned, and that continued for roughly two years.

Two previous six-month experiences as an intern in France and as an electrical engineer in Japan had also left me with mixed feelings about the professional world. All my life I’d been taught that I’d be able to contribute to something meaningful, that I’d help solve the major issues of our time. My whole professional life lay ahead, and I had such energy and desire to be of service to a company, a team, a project. Yet nobody seemed to care. As a recent graduate, I felt like my sole purpose in the company was to generate profit without ever being invested in, properly trained, or used even remotely close to my fullest potential. Knowledge that I had spent years learning and which had required much effort to obtain seemed to be going down the drain for no other reason than poor management. It was clear to me that this was a sinking ship, and I quite honestly did not feel like wasting more of my time remaining aboard.

This was it. This was my starting point, the beginning of my career shift!

Defining clear goals for my career change

Knowing that you want to leave your current industry is one thing, but it is also crucial to know in what field you want to work next. And for me, regardless of how fond of programming I was at the time, it wasn’t clear to me that I’d become a web developer. So I just started reflecting on the things that I would like to experience as part of my dream job:

• to always keep learning new things.

• to have a positive impact on society and/or our planet.

• to have fun!

After reflecting some more and trying to understand myself, I identified criteria regarding which I was not willing to compromise, mostly due to my previous work experiences. Namely, I expected:

• to be treated with respect by any person I work with.

• to be able to work as part of a team and to freely give my opinion (that’s a very French thing to say).

• not to depend too much on skills or technologies used only in a specific industry, because that meant I would become too reliant on that industry and it would be more difficult for me to leave it if I ever wanted to.

• I also hoped that my job would allow me to work from the countryside one day, if I felt that’s what I wanted.

• and finally, it was inconceivable for me to work in a large company again, which I associated at the time, quite honestly, with bullshit jobs. There, I said it.

I had all these criteria, and some of them were already conflicting, especially when it came to having a positive impact on society and on nature. I was even considering growing organic vegetables, which was quite far from my final choice, but that plan seemed unrealistic because of the many lifestyle changes it would require. I was not willing to go that far.

It seemed smarter to reuse the skills I already had. It took me some time to understand that it was more important for me to be in control of my skills, to own my career and skills and to be respected than to actually have an impact in my job (or at least at first).

Web developer you shall be

That’s when web development became the obvious answer. I had always loved programming, had some basic knowledge of C (and more recently Golang), and I had recently come across React tutorials that made it look far more interesting than the Java lectures I had attended during my studies in France! I was only now discovering how fun it was to interact with the browser and to be able to instantly visualise the changes in it when altering the code.

Thinking about it, it really sounded perfect for me:

• Pretty much everybody was looking for web developers at the time. It was easy to work remotely even before COVID-19 (remember that?) made it even more so.

• The web sector was booming at the time and there were many small web agencies to be found everywhere, which looked very appealing to me for a number of reasons: younger and smaller staff, use of more modern technologies and willingness to keep updated with the latest developments in the field.

• The massive use of public or open-source libraries by the web developer community meant that I would be able to learn technical skills recognised outside the company I would work for, and that I would not be forced to remain in an organisation making poor technical choices or lacking long-term vision.

Choosing my stack

Of course, not all web development companies or agencies fit the above description, and therefore it was clear to me that I was targeting a very specific niche. When I understood this, I went one step further and tried to select one specific programming language (or stack) that learning would actually help me secure the job of my dreams, i.e. one meeting as many of the above mentioned criteria as possible.

As someone living in a city where aerospace accounts for the vast majority of available software engineer job openings, I associated Java with the very large companies and projects I was trying to avoid. I loved Golang but it was quite difficult to find any job openings at the time. C or C++ sounded too low-level and “not fun to use” to me. Having spent the last few months trying to learn React with no prior knowledge in web development, that left only one valid option: JavaScript!

JavaScript was, by definition, the language of the web, and using it through React was so much fun! Its ecosystem of public libraries and its active community were absolutely massive, and a quick search showed there were plenty of job openings pretty much everywhere in the whole world. It didn’t take me long before deciding that this was the actual path I wanted to follow…

What’s next

Looking back, it felt quite appropriate to take a few minutes to appreciate the progress I had already made, even though most of it had only taken place in my mind. I had clearly decided what I did not want to do with my life anymore, and established a desirable career path that made me feel full of energy and resolve!

There was however still much to do before I could actually call myself a web developer, and I want to cover that part in my next post. I’ll go through the resources I used and the training I underwent to acquire all the skills necessary to secure my first job as a web developer.

Hope you enjoyed this first read, cheers!