Hi! God, I’ve been waiting to post something in this section since I’ve joined FCC and here I am!

I joined this community a year ago, but really started working on FCC challenges around October 2016, and when beta of the new curriculum went live I’ve switched to it, so I didn’t even get any of the certificates yet even though I finished all of the beta challenges.

I also built a simple portfolio website (enikolaenko.herokuapp.com) and that was pretty much it when I started looking for a job - no degree, no real life projects, nothing. Basically, I just wanted to start job hunting as soon as possible to give myself time to look around, fail a few coding interviews, read “Cracking a coding interview”, polish my resume, maybe find a freelance gig… And after the first coding interview in my life I got the job!

Now, I have to tell you it was pretty much dumb luck - they needed a junior dev ASAP, they found my resume, I agreed to a pretty modest salary. If I didn’t run into them, I could very well spend several months looking for a job, because a lot of junior positions require 1+ years of experience. I also thought I did really poorly in the interview, cause I was so nervous I couldn’t explain what closure is. I swear, I memorised the definition of closure by heart, and still I was sitting there, staring at the wall blankly like a possessed girl from a horror film for about 15 minutes! And they still offered me the job!

The question that got me so stunned sounded like this: "What’s wrong with this code and how to make it work?

for (var i = 0; i < 5; i++) { setTimeout(function() {console.log(i);}, i * 1000); }

The answer was to wrap it into an IFFE: (setTimeout <...>)(i) , so the function would be called with i = 0, i = 1 , etc, instead of i = 5, i = 5 , etc, because, well, CLOSURE.

Other questions were about prototypal inheritance (almost failed this one), finding the biggest 5-digit number in a string like ‘123456789’, some basic JS, HTML and CSS and they also asked me about ES6 and if I use promises or callbacks for asynchronous request)

So, there is no great takeaway from my experience and no useful advice I can give new campers apart from that: getting a coding a job it really, totally doable and making mistakes or not knowing something is okay.

I tried to code every day since I’ve started FCC, but some days I could only code for 1 or 2 hours, and some days I had to skip, and I’ve been lazy, and I’ve asked for help, and I never finished reading some books on programming (“Eloquent Javascript” got the best of me, but “You Don’t Know Javascript” series was really helpful, and so were all the books from the guide by @P1xt), and I’ve still got the job (which is not the end of the journey, of course, but it’s an important point).

The reason I am writing this is, first of all, to brag (obviously), but also - reading topics in this section really helped me to believe I can actually do this and keep studying, so I wanted to share my experience with the community too. FCC community is the best, and I really want to thank @QuincyLarson for making it all possible and all of you guys and gals for being there.

(I’m starting on Monday and I’m really nervous, so wish me luck!)

Update: it’s been a week since I started, and so far it’s going perfect! I was really overwhelmed at first, because working on a part of a huge project (my company builds a learning platform for kids) is very different from building a web page or an applet on Codepen on your own; also

my company uses a framework of their own design, which is powerful, but really hard to learn, and we write in CoffeeScript instead of plain JS, so I’m still adjusting to that. Also I wasn’t really comfortable with Git, but I am now, after almost losing 8-hours worth of code Don’t be like me, learn Git.

But all in all, I wasn’t sure coding was something I can actually do for a living till I started working, but now I’m very happy! Thank you all for wishing me luck, and do find me on linkedin or github if you wanna ask something or just chat!