5 tips for landing your first Junior Web Development job!

More recent posts can be found on medium.com/@devbyrayray

Raymon S — November 03, 2017

You want to gain more serious experience, to get a real job as Junior Web Developer. With these 5 tips, I'm gonna help you to achieve this!

All the tips from my podcast are written below, with the links included!

https://soundcloud.com/mr-frontend-community/mr-frontend-podcast-episode-3-5-tips-for-landing-your-first-junior-web-development-job Build your first website for a real business, without going freelance! When you starting as a junior web developer, it can be hard to gain experience, but this it is not difficult!

In your neighborhood you will have a few shops that you will visit daily, weekly or monthly. A shop where they know you! For example the bakery or your barbershop.

If you have good connections with those people it is very easy to ask them if you may build their website. (Make sure that they don't have already one or have bad one).

But your not gonna do it for free! (NEVER work for FREE!!) You are gonna ask their service in return. Ask if they want to give daily bread once a week in return. Or your barbershop, ask them to do style and cut your hair for a year long!

I know this will work! I did it for a local church and a barbershop 👍

So step up and ask for the opportunity! Take the freedom to ask will bring you a lot of more good things! Build your own portfolio website! As a web developer, you need an online presence. You've gotta prove that you know how to develop a website. So start building your own portfolio website in plain HTML and CSS.

Register your domain, pay for a cheap web hosting.

Make a simple design for yourself on paper or a design tool you prefer. Build it like you imagine!

If you need some inspiration on designs, visit Dribbble.com and get inspired!

After you build your website upload it to your web hosting. Now you can show the worlds your projects and websites!

Cheap Web Developer hosting

I would recommend my personal favorite. A special Web Developer web hosting company called WebFaction. It is super easy to have multiple websites & multiple domains. You can install NodeJS, Git, WordPress, Php, Python and a lot more with 1 click!

All my websites, including mrfrontend.org, are on there! If you click my link and pay for one of their web hosting plans. I will get a small thankyou money from them, but if I wouldn't I still recommend their web hosting 🙏

Someone on Reddit reminded me to this!

There are some nice free hosting services for static sites with GitHub Pages i'ts totally free, it is hosted inside your repository. Create simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript demos on CodePen.io I love CodePen.io for 1 simple reason! You can play with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript before you use it in a real website.

You gain experience with web development by practicing of course! Write CODE! So do that by building small components by your own design or designs you saw online!

All can embed these Codepen demos on your portfolio website. Your portfolio does not have to include only websites that are online. Share the path of learning web development by a blog or videos You can show your personality for a potential employer by keeping an online journal of the things you have learned!

Register a free blog on wordpress.com or medium.com and start writing about your journey and things you have learned. Some prefer videos of screencasts or vlogs.

A potential employer can see your learnings and your personality! Don’t be a course Developer, be practical and fix your own need 1 advice, don’t be a course Developer. I won’t say that courses are bad, NO not at all! But take the knowledge you learned from those courses by building real-world applications!

For example, if you have a problem with keeping track of your expenses. Think about a solution how you could fix it. Make an app that will help you solve your problems.

One day I had a problem with clothing sizes. Not that I didn’t fit my clothes 😇 , but the different terms they use for sizes in the EU, UK or the US.

So I searched for the data and made my first practical AngularJS application. Created filters and a data grid, to help me solve my problem.

To get real-world experience with web development. Make sure you build an application to solve your or others real world problems! Do you want to have personal training by me? With Mr Frontend, I want to help you get more focused on the things that matter and the things that will help you grow.

If you want me to help you more, support my blogs, video's and podcast and go to https://patreon.com/mrfrontend and choose the amount of money you want to spend. For (almost) every amount there is a thank you package!

A few packages have some personal training moments in it, so go and check it out!