Wa Vang - Content Editor / Email Developer

Truthfully, my coding journey took a total of 3 years to secure a coding job, but my journey began in 2018, five years ago. I tried various learning platforms but struggled to find structure and motivation because I had 3 young children and other obligations.

I started learning on freeCodeCamp and Team Treehouse then jumped into Odin Project. After learning from those resources for about 6 months, I felt my learning process was not structured enough so I decided to go to my local community college and join their IT-Web Software Developer program. I took some courses for about 1 year and learned a lot about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SQL, and Java. As one of my fellow CodingPhase colleagues pointed out, college courses are good at teaching syntax, coding structure, and the fundamentals. However, they often fail to provide practical experience and job readiness. At the end, I was overwhelmed by the number of things I was learning simultaneously which made it impossible for me to integrate my knowledge into creating a functional website or application.

Despite a year of college courses, I still felt no closer to my goal of landing a job in the IT industry. Consequently, I turned to the internet to seek alternative learning resources. These resources included: Udemy courses, I even tried Stefan Mischook courses, other online learning platforms like Coursera, Khan Academy, and I went through half of the Harvard CS50 on Youtube. I kept relearning all the concepts I had already learned when I went through my community college and realized these learning platforms did not help me at all. When Covid hit, I stopped learning for 2 years, I felt defeated and went back to working my regular job.
I only came back to learn coding when I saw one of Joe’s video on Youtube again in January of 2023.

I want people who are learning on this platform to know that CodingPhase turned out to be the only resource that taught me the necessary skills and knowledge to get a job in the IT industry. Joe's teachings were practical, relevant, and effective in impressing hiring managers and recruiters. It only took me from the end of January 2023 to April 2023 to get a job in the IT industry thanks to CodingPhase.
Learn from my mistakes and don't waste time like I did. And if you read through all this, my advice to aspiring coders is to never give up, even when it seems tough. It's normal to feel like giving up at times. I, too, felt that way multiple times, but I persevered and kept coming back.