Forem: Florin Pop

My First Developer Job - 30 Stories

Florin Pop — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 10:04:15 +0000

Originally published on MakeMoney.dev

Our industry is growing at a rapid rate with many people looking to get their first dev job. In this article you're going to read the stories of 30 different developers (having different backgrounds) and how they got their first dev job. Get the most out of their stories and apply it to your own journey.

Anastasia Marchenkova

Twitter

I was a technical account manager at a startup with 300 people, but worked with our CTO directly to support our customers. I did code projects on the side to help my team out since engineering bandwidth was limited. After seeing my work and especially how hard I worked, the CTO decided to move me to engineering without any interview. I had taken just one python class in college, and the rest was self-taught!

Arvid Kahl

Twitter

My first dev job was for a VC-funded business on SF as a remote engineer working from Germany. I got the job because the CEO asked me in a Twitter DM if “I wanted a gig” because he had seen my GitHub profile and I had just built a project with the exact tech them that they used for their service. Two weeks later, I was flown into SF to meet the team and see if I was a fit. Worked for them for over a year. Learned more from a week on that job than from years of university.

Albert Walicki

Twitter

I graduated from civil engineering about 4.5 years ago, and I already knew that I wouldn't fit there. I was always into computers. I wrote my first line of code when I was 13 or 14 years old. It was Ruby on Rails. But I give up after a few days.

After graduation, I decided to become a frontend developer. I attend a Bootcamp, but it was a loss of money. I was ahead of my classmates, and I had to wait for them... 😥

After 4 months of learning, I decided to send some CVs. I sent over 50 CVs, and I had 6 interviews. One of them goes well, and here I am. I'm working with the same company for almost 4 years. At the beginning of this year, my company decided to make me a partner in the company.

Agathe Badia

Twitter

I used to be a Tech Recruiter at Honeypot, and after 3 years, I got the suggestion from the CEO at the time (Emma Tracey) to become a developer. After a lot of time of pros and cons of should I do it or not, I decided to switch and did a bootcamp. Since Feb 2020, I am a Junior Frontend Developer at Honeypot. 😁

Ahmad Awais

Twitter

I had pitched a developer marketing campaign to an ad agency when I was in college. The project was small but went well. They asked me to contact them when I graduate. And that's how I got my first job, right after graduation, that paid three times what my class fellows got paid.

Arpan

Twitter

I am still in the final year of University and felt like I was good enough with JavaScript and React to get a job in tech. Still it was really, really difficult to crack the initial interviews and I was not able to get to a place I wanted to be in. Meanwhile I stayed active on discord servers, helping people and eventually the right people took notice and someone from my current company reached out to me on discord.

Ania Kubow

Twitter

For me I was very proactive about getting my first developer Job. I was in change of a tech meet-up, I went to events and in general got to know the developer community where I live. It was nice as when it came down to it, I did not feel forced into a role just because it was my only option, and I was able to take my time and choose the best offer for me personally. Saying that it took A LOT of work and many hours of my day, for weeks! So be prepared to get out there are put in the time!

Anna McDougall

Twitter

I used to be an opera singer and had been learning web development for about a year. I created a video introducing myself and my skillset, and posted it to Twitter. It was forwarded on to the managing director of my company, who immediately messaged me with information and asked for a chat. After talking to him and then having another meeting with HR and my team lead, I got an offer the very next day and began work as a Junior Software Engineer

Annie

Twitter

My bootcamp had something called "Industry Day", a kind of potential dev <> employer speed dating event. Us students sat at tables with our laptops and gave 2 min pitches; introducing ourselves and explaining our favourite project to potential employers/hiring partners. The bell rings. They move around. I had a couple of interviews as a result, and accepted an offer two weeks later!

Bivor

Twitter

I got my first job offer while I was still finishing my 5 month internship after a year of vocational school in web development. I had no prior education/experience before I started the dev school. They took me after just an informal interview and a background check with my internship company. Unfortunately that job lasted only 3 months. However It took me only 3 weeks to land my current job. I was invited for an interview. I showed them my ongoing MERN project. They were looking for a React developer and I had been learning React for over a year. I had another round of interview but I was just for one final confirmation.

Bogdan Bujdea

Twitter

I applied for various internships through college, and I only got accepted for one in my 3rd year. I participated at a Hackathon in the weekend and next week I was supposed to have an interview. When I got there, I realized that the two people interviewing me were members of the jury in the hackathon and they immediately recognized me. It was the best interview ever, I felt like I got the job from the start so I wasn't nervous at all (compared with the other interviews where my palms were sweating constantly).

Along the way, I had interviews for other jobs with people that read my blog or participated at talks that I gave so it was pretty easy to pass them. What I'm trying to say is that getting involved will help you a lot in your career! 😊

Brad Traversy

Twitter

I had some pretty tough barriers in my way from a troubled past to anxiety issues and absolutely no experience, so I started with freelancing. I was able to put together a pretty impressive portfolio of real client projects in production and around 2012, I landed my first dev role at a medium sized company north of Boston. I worked with a lot of PHP, jQuery and later on, AngularJS. Later, I ended up starting my own little business offering different types of web services and ultimately ended up doing what I love most, which is teaching and content creation.

Brian Hilson

Twitter

I spent one year learning basic programming skills by taking the free "Intro to programming" courses from Stanford, MIT, and the University of Helsinki, and by going through some of freeCodeCamp's web developer curriculum. Networking at a local programmer meetup got me my first interview, which led to a job.

Learning is important, but the cheat code to getting a job is networking.

Chris Sev

Twitter

I learned to code at age 14 and started freelancing. I did sites for free, sites for neighbors, and got paid eggs for another site.

When I got to college, I had a web dev class where the entire semester was learning how to make a website. I told the professor that I already made websites. He said "Show me a website". I showed him a website and he said "Wow! this is great! To get your A for this class, you will do my client projects!" So he actually paid me and gave me an A for that class. And then I had him for 3 other classes! The biggest project I built with him was a big project that was showcased in a Las Vegas casino's systems!

codeSTACKr

Twitter

I basically fell into my dev job. I had been coding on the side for a while but was working as an IT Engineer designing/maintaining large network infrastructures. I saw some manual processes that were happening in the company that were very time consuming. I knew these could be easily automated, so I built an application on the side and showed my boss. It saved the company lots of time and money. That was 15 years ago and ever since then I've been a developer and never looked back.

Colby Fayock

Twitter

My dev journey started off as a designer who wanted to play around with customizing MySpace profiles and building Counter-Strike team pages with HTML and CSS. Over time, I taught myself how to code, adding JavaScript along the way, and landed my first web-like job about 9 months after I graduated from college, part-time building email templates in HTML. Like most startups, the interview process consisted of some of your normal questions about my work, showing off some of my portfolio which was critical to helping demonstrate my capabilities, but also included some interesting questions like what type of bread-like item I was, which I ended up going with a bagel! 😂

Danny Thompson

Twitter

My tech career started with Java and Angular. The interview process for my first job was multiple rounds of interviews, whiteboard coding and all the things that we hate about interviews (lol). I prepared by making projects that I can discuss in an interview, speaking to developers that work there on LinkedIn so I would have an idea of what they worked on so I could mention those things in the interview. The effort, information and expressed interest won the interviewers over!

Derek Drummond

Twitter

I hadn't heard back on any of the 5 positions I applied for at different divisions for this company so I showed up in a suit and tie to follow up on them. That scored me the interview, which was a phone screen from HR, initial talk with the Director of Engineering, a take home assessment then meet the team for a personality culture fit. I didn't know PHP, MongoDB, XSLT or anything about REST API's so I spent at least 35 hours that week learning and doing the take home assessment and then in the meet the team interview I pushed that I'm willing to learn anything and I think that's what landed me the job.

Dennis Ivy

Twitter

In 2017 I was working for a forensics laboratory as head of marketing. The company was using an outdated system to manage lab samples and was activity looking for someone to build out an entirely new system with a budget of about $70,000 to start.

At the time the only coding experience I had was some HTML and CSS skills for customizing Wordpress websites. I saw this as my chance to learn how to code and land my first gig, so what did I do? I spent every free moment I had for the next 3 months reading every book I could find and watching YouTube videos. Most days I woke up 2 hours before work to code and then stayed up to 2-3 in the morning studying.

Well after those 3 months I felt confident enough to draw up a prototype of what I had in mind for the new system and pitched the concept at the next company meeting. Long story short, I landed the gig and spent the next two years building and maintaining the system before I sold it to the company for $41,000.

Eddy Vinck

Twitter

My first job was the result of doing a good job at my internship. They asked if I wanted to stay, so I did all my studying on Monday for my degree, and worked the other 4 days at my job.

Finished my degree with 2 years of working experience! 🔥

Filip Pacurar

Twitter

I was a geek in high school and started learning programming. People around me knew me as the guy who makes a website for everything. This was my "reputation". Then, one day a guy that knew me from school and graduated a few years before, created a startup and I was the first developer there, right after I graduated high school. I stayed there for 5 years, first I started learning more stuff and I was also paid to do that. In conclusion, a large chunk of what I know today is because of my geek reputation in high school and because of that guy who offered me a chance when everybody else was only looking for experience.

Florin Pop

Twitter

I had a few "different" first dev jobs. My first freelancing job. My first part-time job. My first full-time job.

I got my first freelancing gig after learning the basics of HTML and CSS (pretty much on my own). For this gig I had to convert a template from design to code.

During college I attended a career fair and there were these companies that were looking for students to take on different part-time positions. I applied for a company that sounded interesting and after a short coding quiz, I got the job.

My first full-time position came 1 year after I finished college. I already had experience working as a freelance web developer and I started learning React several months before, which was proven to be the key to landing this job. I aced the coding interview process as I've spent a good amount of time learning and preparing for such an interview, plus I also had an advantage because I "didn't have to" get the job which meant that I was very relaxed during the interview which I got the job.

Florian Kapfenberger

Twitter

I started learning Java in school, but it did not grew on me. In my spare time l learned HTML, CSS and Javascript together with the React framework. I watched a lot of YouTube videos, bought courses and built a lot of projects on my own. It took me 2 months to find a job where I would work as a React Frontend Developer. The interview process was not so bad, I could talk about all the things that excited me about React and the web and after completing a simple take home test I was hired!

Francesco Ciulla

Twitter

To be honest, I didn't really "prepare" for the interview, because I wasn't actively looking for a job. I was just studying on my own and a university professor sent me some emails about this possibility.

The interview process was in 2 phases, the first with the human resources and the second with the technician. The question I was asked was about Git, Npm, JavaScript, and Docker, even though the Company wasn't using it yet.

What I can say is that you don't need a computer science degree to work in technology. But for me it helped the have the contact to work for a great company, so if you want to get a degree for various reasons, it might come in handy in some weird ways, like this one.

Everything we do, in some way, will be useful to us in the future. The last thing I can say is that a few months earlier I did another interview, for a smaller company (always by the same professor), where I was refused for not remembering some basic sql commands. So don't feel bad if you get turned down from an interview. It could be the luckiest day of your life.

Jessica Chan (aka TheCoderCoder)

Twitter

I actually got my first job though a recruiting agency (in in the US). I gave them my resume and they found all the jobs and interviews for me, which was really great. My skillset at the time was more backend: SQL, VB.NET.

The interview process differed based on company. For some I had to do whiteboard questions, for others they would do a phone screen to ask me certain concepts, and others I had to do a live coding test to solve problems on a computer in front of the interviewers.

In total it took me maybe a few weeks to land my first job after starting with the recruiting agency. I think nowadays it takes much longer to find a job. I admittedly got my first dev job almost 10 years ago, but as someone who has been on the other side of interviewing more recently I think there are some ways you can prepare that still hold true now.

First is to have a good portfolio website with links to your GitHub projects and websites. Even if they're demo sites, anything that will help potential employers see what your skill set is is a good thing. Try to make your websites look as polished and professional as you can. Take advantage of frameworks like Bootstrap or Tailwind if your design/CSS skills aren't your forte. Keep your GitHub organized with good readme's to make it easy for employers to quickly assess your work.

Lors

Twitter

I prepared for my first job by knowing basics of the technologies that were required for that role. Requirements were HTML, CSS JS & PHP. I had no knowledge of PHP prior to my interview, I had projects to display and a portfolio also. These projects weren’t the best, but they demonstrated my passion for learning and having a go which is what employers love to see. It took me 3 months to get my first role. I was approached by a recruiter local to me & introduced to the company. We had an interview scheduled for the following week (on my birthday!) and it consisted of questions on the requirements above, as well as accessibility, design & photoshop, but no technical test. I love my job now I’ve settled in & I also help out in the family business with website design & images for an E-commerce & Magento site.

Luc Constantin

Twitter

I am coming from 12 years of logistics and at 42 after 9 months I landed my first job. I studied frontend development during this time. With zero knowledge into programming I had to schedule between 3 - 5 hours per day so that I could get the job. The interview process was smooth and after a week I received a full time job as a frontend developer.

Mads Brodt

Twitter

I was studying software development while learning front-end in my free time. Met the company at a career fair, told them I wasn't sure I was ready to work as a front-ender yet. They told me to apply anyway, and I did it on the same day. Got the job a few weeks later.

Phillip Ninan

Twitter

I was in school and got a crappy internship paying $500 a month. I leveraged that internship to get a better one paying $25 / hour. Once I graduated, the company sponsoring me offered me a FT job! My big takeaway is that you just need that first gig which will you make you more reputable.

Piyush Mahapatra

Twitter

I am a Life Sciences graduate since 2019. I loved the subject but the infrastructure and funding aren't good for Research and Development in my country, so I made a switch.

Started learning HTML and CSS and then some JavaScript. Realised how important JavaScript is and went totally deep and learnt both Backend and Frontend. Created a nice project and started applying for jobs. Got a job in October 2020 after 8 months of learning.

Ivan Saldano

Twitter

I din't come from a CS background and I didn't start programming until my mid twenties. One day it hit me that my current career path was not gonna give me financial stability so I started to learn programming.

For almost two years, I dedicated one to two hours of study every night. It was fun and I enjoyed learning. I wasn't in an immediate need to find a job so that helped me a lot. When I finally felt ready, I started applying and after around six months I got my first developer job. It was a very tiring process, lots of ghosting, take home assessments and rejections.

My advice is to be patient and consistent, this is a long process for most people, so don't get discouraged when things don't work out. Also never stop learning.

Sarah Shook

Twitter

I spent 8 years as a recruiter, 2 of which was in the IT field; during that time I learned the lingo and a couple of developers took time out of their day to teach me the basics (one showed me how to make a calculator using C#). I landed a role at my spouse's company as a tech admin, where I got into PowerShell. It's a small company, and when we updated systems, they needed someone to learn the languages to maintain and customize the system (JavaScript - including jQuery - and PL/SQL). I told them I would do it, and that led me into my current position. Now I'm focusing on solidifying my knowledge so I can advance my career further, but my first dev role has been a great stepping stone - I took it upon myself to learn new languages, and I'm excited to see where I end up in the next few years.

Tadas Petra

Twitter

My first Dev role was as a Software Engineer at a truck manufacturing company. I developed software that is controlling thousands of semi trucks in the US. The way I got this job is pretty boring. I went to a job fair at my school to look for an internship. I ended up being an intern there, my last summer before I graduated. After I finished the internship, they offered me a full time position starting the summer after. And I took it!

Tom Burdak

Twitter

Honing skills that align with the area in tech I wanted to work was super helpful in landing an internship and then full time job with Microsoft right out of college. I knew I wanted to be in the games side of dev, and my interests with lower level systems, AI and networks were a natural fit. I set out to work on game related projects that focused on those skills including a game server for other students to use in their game projects to stand out to the recruiters that came to a local job fair, showing passion and drive along with the skill set to back it up.

Vadim Savin

Twitter

I was in 10th grade and after winning the 3rd place at national IT contest I applied for fun at a couple companies. One called back, and during the call I was telling them that I basically know nothing and they said no worries, you will learn. That’s how I got my first dev job.

Vlad Pasca

Twitter

I was almost 4 months into coding, learned HTML, CSS and just started with JavaScript when I made a post on subreddit with developers from my country. I asked for some help with what should I do next. Someone who had a startup reached out to me and said that they want to hire me in order to make their website responsive. To test me out they gave me simple CSS tasks which I solved in a few hours and got the job.

Conclusion

Different people. Different backgrounds. Different stories. Same result.

Let's sum this all up with a few key takeaways:

take your time to learn and experiment with the basics.
build projects and create a portfolio. Make the journey easier by building projects which you are passionate about.
apply for jobs and go to interviews. Try to learn something from every experience, even if you don't get the job on the first try.

Share your story

Feel free to share your own story of how you got your first dev job in the comments section below. We'd love to read it! 😊

10 JavaScript Projects in 1 Hour - Coding Challenge

Florin Pop — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 06:32:36 +0000

TL;DR: I completed a Coding Challenge in which I created: 10 JavaScript Projects in 1 Hour, all while being live on Twitch.

You can find the recording on YouTube below:

If you like this type of content, don't forget to give it a like 👍 and subscribe. It will help a lot! Thank you! 🙏

This is the follow-up challenge after I completed the 10 JavaScript Projects in 10 Hours Coding Challenge a week before.

After the success of the previous challenge I wanted to try something even crazier and as I mentioned at the end of the previous article, 10 Projects in 1 Hour sounded liked a good challenge.

So as usual, I planned out the project I wanted to create, I hit the "Stream" and "Record" buttons on my stream deck and... GO! 🔥

Here is the list of Projects I ended up coding:

Hamburger Button & Hidden Menu
Toast Notification
Auto Write Text
Popup / Modal
Purple Heart Rain
Background Changer
Dark Mode Toggle
Image Carousel
Sound Board
Zoom effect

The code is on GitHub and the projects are live here.

As you can see, the projects aren't very sophisticated and they can't really be as I only had 6 minutes on average per project. That's not a lot of time 😅.

The good thing was that I created a "Base Project" which had the HTML, CSS and JavaScript files ready and connected so I only had to focus on actually writing the code for the projects.

Also, knowing some keyboard shortcuts was definitely very helpful.

I ended up finishing the 10 projects in about 54 minutes. I could have tried to do another project, but I didn't... 10 projects would do in an hour, right? 😆

Looking back at it, the Sound Board project took to longest to finish (almost 8 minutes) but I have to say that the most fun to build was the Purple Heart Rain. I 💜 Purple! 💜 (If you follow me on Twitter you might already know that 😆).

All in all was a fun challenge. I could say that it was more intense than the previous one but at the same time, faster to complete so at the end it evens it out.

Next up in line: 10 Websites - Design to HTML/CSS, all in one go.

I'll keep you posted on how that goes!

Feel free to join on Twitch if you want to see the live action!

Thank you for reading! I hope you find it inspiring and that you'll also try this challenge one day and you'll have as much fun as I did!

Happy Coding! 😇

10 JavaScript Projects in 10 Hours - Coding Challenge

Florin Pop — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 13:48:10 +0000

TL;DR: I completed a Coding Challenge in which I created: 10 JavaScript Projects in 10 Hours, all while being live on Twitch.

You can find the recording on YouTube below:

If you like this type of content, don't forget to give it a like 👍 and subscribe. It will help a lot! Thank you! 🙏

Last week I woke up with this crazy idea in mind...

I went for a run and the idea kept making me more and more excited. I wanted to do it! 🔥

I love challenges. Especially Coding challenges. Especially these crazy ones.

I also knew that people would love to see a crazy person (aka me) doing a crazy challenge like this one.

So I pretty much had everything I needed to get started.

10 hours to 'kill'. OBS for streaming. VSCode for coding. But I needed the projects. What should I build? 🤔

I just went live and silently started working on the Project Ideas. Most of them came from my app-ideas repository which I am very grateful for creating a year ago. It comes in handy whenever you need an idea for an app/project.

The people who were watching me had no idea yet of what I was about to do. I just kept gathering resources and writing them down in a README file.

Also had to look up some designs for the projects. I'm probably the worst designer I know so... I couldn't rely on those "skills" (if you can call them that, lol).

I used this amazing resource by my friend Ildi on UI Design Daily. Designs which you can use for any project you want, even commercial ones, without attribution. Pretty cool, eh? 😁

Once I had all 10 Projects written down I also wanted to make sure that they are not the same and that there is a little bit of diversity.

Here is the list of Projects I ended up coding:

Countdown Timer
Quiz App
Recipe App
Notes App
ToDo App
Movies App
GitHub Profiles
Drawing App
Password Generator
Weather App

The code is on GitHub and the projects are live here.

I had an audience on Twitter, Twitch and Discord which joined the stream to support me. Very supportive people (thank you! 🙏).

And... the challenge started!

I went through those projects, one by one... and yes, I had some bathroom breaks. 😄
No, I didn't eat anything during the stream. I had a shake before so it was all good considering the adrenaline rush I got from the challenge. 👍

The first two projects went ok, but then I spent a bit too much time on the Recipe app.

I added a favorite functionality for the meals which were stored in localStorage (don't ask me why) and it cost me almost 2 hours.

Had some extra time from the previous projects so at the end it was ok.

Probably the "biggest" challenge was the Drawing app because I had to use the canvas and I haven't worked with it in a while.

I solved that by doing some good ol' research and (re)learning it on the fly. 😁 I think people liked that part.

Debugging and research is a big part of our coding journey so... why hide it, right?

All in all, everything went great!

Lots of people joined during these 10+ hours. I remember that at one point we had over 100+ live viewers. Crazy! 😄

The day after the stream I also uploaded the video to my YouTube Channel and so far this has been the greatest, fastest growing video I did. Even the YouTube algorithm picked it up, which was amazing!

At the time I'm writing this the video has close to 40k views and over 4k people subscribed to my channel since I uploaded it! I'm very grateful for that!

People seem to enjoy these kind of challenges so... I'm going to try some more! 😁

Next up in line: 10 JavaScript Projects in 1 Hour. Mini-projects. 6 minute projects.

I'll keep you posted on how that goes!

Feel free to join on Twitch if you want to see the live action!

Thank you for reading! I hope you find it inspiring and that you'll also try this challenge one day and you'll have as much fun as I did!

Happy Coding! 😇

Is live coding fun?

Florin Pop — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 18:41:27 +0000

Do you think Live Coding is fun? If not... what do you think it will make it fun? 😊

I’ve seen gamers streaming and having thousands and thousands of viewers. Why can’t we (as programmers) have that? 🤔

This question is bugging me for a while now and I want to find a solution.

As a streamer myself I’d like to have more people who are engaged with the content that I’m producing and at the end have more fun AND learn more.

24 JavaScript Array Methods Explained (video series)

Florin Pop — Wed, 06 May 2020 07:11:11 +0000

Arrays are amongst the most important data types one should know in JavaScript and it's usually a good idea to know how to work with them.

For that I created a video series describing the most important 24 Array Methods.

You can find below all these Array Methods explained with examples.

I hope you'll enjoy! 😃

P.S. While you are there, feel free to subscribe and help me reach 20k!

Thank you! 🙏

24 JavaScript Array Methods explained (video format)

Florin Pop — Fri, 03 Apr 2020 15:58:44 +0000

In the past 24 hours I did a crazy thing (at least some would say that).

I created 24 videos explaining 24 JavaScript Array Methods (with examples).

Here you can find the playlist with all of them.

And here's a list of all the methods I covered:

forEach
map
filter
reduce
every
some
find
findIndex
slice
splice
sort
concat
fill
includes
join
reverse
push
pop
unshift
shift
indexOf and lastIndexOf
from
isArray
flat

I hope you'll enjoy! 😊

The #7Days7Websites Coding Challenge

Florin Pop — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 11:44:58 +0000

I believe that one of the best ways to improve your coding skills is to... CODE MORE!

For that I have the perfect challenge for you! 🤩

It's called: #7Days7Websites

The main rule is simple: build one website, every day, for a week.

Here is a short video I made to explain everything in more details:

You can find the official website here.

Rules

Create a website every day for a week.
You can use any programming language and/or any framework you want.
The website can be on any topic.
Submit your entries on the submit page.
Share your progress on Social Media using the #7Days7Websites hashtag.

Live Streams

I'm also going to attempt this challenge in a series of Live Streams on my YouTube Channel. Subscribe if you want to get notified when I go live.

Suggestions

Anyone is free to build anything they want, but if you don't have an idea or you want some inspirations, here are some of the websites that could help:

Showcase

At the end of these 7 days I'm going to make a Special Live Stream where I'm going to showcase the best submissions.

Conclusion

I hope this challenge will get the best out of you and it will help you improve your coding skills! 😃

Happy Coding! 😇

How a simple tweet got me 24x more YouTube subscribers

Florin Pop — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 12:39:33 +0000

I've been struggling for a while to send my 18k (soon 19k) twitter followers to subscribe to my YouTube channel (only 8k subs) with very little results... until one tweet just... EXPLODED! 😆

For the past 3 weeks I've been Live Streaming like crazy (over 60 hours worth of content) in order to finish this new challenge "Conquering freeCodeCamp's Curriculum".

I wanted to do this because I knew it would help a lot of people considering the fact that the curriculum covers a wide range of topics (from basic HTML/CSS and JavaScript to React, Redux, NodeJS, Express, MongoDB and more...).

My hope was that this challenge will boost my subscribers count and my viewership helping me reach my biggest goal for 2020 (100,000 subscribers on YouTube), but it didn't go the way I planned it...

Although some people were constantly showing up in the Live Streams, the viewership dropped slowly. 😞

I was getting a boost of likes on the tweets in which I was posting an image with the new certifications that I was getting (2-400 likes), but when I was going live I was still getting a low number of viewers and not a lot of new subscribers.

Nevertheless, I continued going through the sections and at the end I ended up covering all of the topics mentioned above. Which IMO is very useful for those who want to start but need a little help. They can just watch me do the same thing AND talk my reasoning behind it PLUS some extra tips&tricks.

So I thought that I should just create a tweet in which I'm going to list all of the topics and tell people that: "Hey... I got you covered if you want to learn these!".

The effort for this tweet was minimal... 5 minutes of work, but then the tweet just... EXPLODED!

I got more subscribers in 1 hour than I was getting in 1 day (and still counting... 🤞).

A couple of things to note about the tweet:

It's broken down in 2 separate tweets
The first tweet is the list of the technologies which you can learn from my channel - "shareable content"
The second tweet contains the actual link to my YouTube channel PLUS a call-to-action: "subscribe"
Didn't want to add the link inside the tweet because AFAIK Social Media platforms tend to not promote the links to outside sources that much, so I'm trying to avoid that

I hope this little experience of mine helps you too! Let me know if it does or if you have any questions! 😃

Links:
Twitter - florinpop1705
YouTube - florinpop

Declare Your Love Like a Programmer ❤️

Florin Pop — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 11:19:10 +0000

Originally posted on www.florin-pop.com

Today is Valentines Day! 😍

How nice would it be if you sent a Romantic Message every hour to your loved one? But even better...

How awesome would it be to do it automatically using a NodeJS script? We are after all... programmers, right? 😏

In this short tutorial I'm going to show you how to do it.

P.S. For the lazy ones out there, here is a Video Tutorial:

Create a CRON job

First, we need to create a CRON job which will run a function every hour.

For that, let's install the node-cron package into our NodeJS app:

npm install node-cron

Next, we're going to schedule a function to run every hour:

const cron = require('node-cron');

cron.schedule('0 * * * *', () => {
    sendMessage();
});

Perfect. We don't have the sendMessage() function yet, but we'll create it later.

Also, in case you don't know how the CRON string works, here is an awesome website where you can test it out.

Basically '0 * * * *' means: Run every hour at 0 minutes, so it will run at: 00:00, 01:00, 02:00, etc... You get the point!

Connect to Twilio

We need a Twilio acount, so head over to Twilio.com and create one. You need to verify your email address and also verify the number you want to send message to. (I had to "steal" my wife's phone in order to verify the number 😅)

In there they'll ask you a couple of questions like: "What programming language are you using"... You can pick NodeJS and then you'll end up on the /console page.

Here you'll get the ACCOUNT SID and AUTH TOKEN. We need these to call the Twilio API so we are going to store them inside a config.js file.

Warning: Do not share the AUTH TOKEN. This is a secret key so we're going to store them inside this "secret" config.js file.

Great.

The next thing will be to create a Trial Number (you can find the button on the /console page). This number will be used to send message FROM.

Now that we have everything in place, let's go back to our code!

We need to install the Twilio package: npm install twilio and we need to use the data we stored inside the ./config.js file.

Along the ACCOUNT_SID and AUTH_TOKEN we can also store the PHONE_NR of our loved one as we are going to use this to tell Twilio where to send the message TO.

Let's do that and also let's create the sendMessage() function, which will... send a message 😆.

const config = require('./config');
const accountSid = config.ACCOUNT_SID;
const authToken = config.AUTH_TOKEN;
const client = require('twilio')(accountSid, authToken);

function sendMessage() {
    client.messages
        .create({
            body: 'Your Message here',
            from: '+19166191713',
            to: config.PHONE_NR
        })
        .then(message => {
            console.log(message);
        });
}

You can see that the client.messages.create() function required three things:

The body/the message
The FROM number (this is the trial number created above)
The TO number (this is the number we want to send the message to)

Get the messages

We need a list of 24 romantic messages, so for that let's create a messages.js file and put all the messages in there inside an array.

module.exports = [
    `If I could give you one thing in life, I'd give you the ability to see yourself through my eyes, only then would you realize how special you are to me.`,
    `If you were a movie, I'd watch you over and over again.`,
    `In a sea of people, my eyes always search for you.`
];

I only added 3 messages above, but you can fill the array up till you get to 24 messages.

Combine everything

Now that we have all the 3 components:

the CRON job
the Twilio sendMessage() call
the messages

We can combine them into the final code:

const cron = require('node-cron');

const config = require('./config');
const accountSid = config.ACCOUNT_SID;
const authToken = config.AUTH_TOKEN;
const client = require('twilio')(accountSid, authToken);

const messages = require('./messages');

const currentMessage = 0;

function sendMessage() {
    client.messages
        .create({
            body: messages[currentMessage],
            from: '+19166191713',
            to: config.PHONE_NR
        })
        .then(message => {
            currentMessage++;
            console.log(message);
        });
}

cron.schedule('0 * * * *', () => {
    console.log('Message sent!');
    sendMessage();
});

You can see that I added a currentMessage counter which will be incremented every time we send a message, this way we're going to loop over the entire array of messages.

That's it! 😃

Now you can run the script and it'll send a romantic message, every hour, to your loved one!

Happy Valentines! 😇

80+ Application Ideas for Developers

Florin Pop — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 12:43:47 +0000

Have you ever wanted to build something but you had no idea what to build? Just as authors sometimes have "writers block" it's also true for developers.

I had this issue a lot in the past so I decided to do something about it and I created the app-ideas repository. Here you can find a list of over 80 application/project ideas that you can use for your next project.

Not only that, but each project has a list of:

user stories
bonus features
example projects

Everything you need in order to follow along easily. 👍

I also created a video explaining the repository. You can check it out below:

Enjoy! 😃

I "Hacked" YouTube's Homepage with a Chrome Extension - Video

Florin Pop — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 14:44:26 +0000

I was too lazy to write a blog post, so I made a video. 😆

Let me know if you still prefer a blog post and I'll convert it.

Meanwhile... Here's the video:

I Created a Video per Day for the entire month of January

Florin Pop — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 09:47:16 +0000

This article was originally posted on www.florin-pop.com.

At the end of 2019 I promised that 2020 will be all about my YouTube channel. So that's what I did. 😃

On the first day of January I started the #31Days31Videos challenge in which I had to upload a video on my channel, every single day, for the entire month of January.

You can find all the videos in this playlist. It covers topics like: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React and some tips for website development.

Among the 31 videos, I also did 11 Live Streams in which we (me and the community) built a couple of projects and websites. (Landing Page, Portfolio Website, Countries REST Web App, ReactJS App and much more...)

So that makes up to a total of 42 videos uploaded to my YouTube channel in January 2020. A lot of work, I must say. 😆 But it was a lot of fun too!

Now let's see how this helped my channel...

Before the Challenge

I started uploading videos to the channel on 7th November 2019. By the end of the year I uploaded 11 videos and I did 2 Live Streams which got me:

1,800 Subscribers
13,400 Views
430 Watch Time (hours)

After the Challenge

As mentioned above, in January 2020 I uploaded 31 videos (for the #31Days31Videos challenge) and I did 11 Live Streams which got me an extra of:

4,000 Subscribers
~54,000 Views
2,600 Watch Time (hours)

Here is a screenshot of January analytics:

Besides uploading the videos I also worked a lot on sharing them on multiple Social Media platforms like: Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, HackerNews, IndieHackers, Dev.to, FreeCodeCamp.

People say I'm everywhere and... that's true 😆. Nowadays it's important to have as many eyes 👀 on your content as possible because you never know what could happen. And thanks to Social Media it's easier than ever to do that.

And I also had a couple of collaborations with Brad Traversy, Creative-Tim and FrontendMentors which helped on "spreading the word" about my channel.

Future Plans

Now that the challenge is over I'm planning to continue to upload at least 3 videos and do 1 Live Stream every week.

Also, I'm looking for more collaborations with other YouTubers and/or companies which would be interested in this so that I can get in front of more people.

The mighty goal of 2020 is to get to 100,000 Subscribers! 🤞

Until then though, I want to reach 4,000 watch time hours (800 hours left) in order to be able to monetize the channel. This will help a lil' considering that this is all that I do now... (It will help a lil' more actually 😆).

And... There will be more challenges, because that's how we roll! 😎

Have you heard about my plans to conquer the FreeCodeCamp curriculum in a series of Live Streams? 😏 Stay tuned for more info about it!

Conclusion

Although it was a lot of work on producing the content, it was a fun month. I've learned a lot along the way, made new friends for which I'm very grateful and I'm very happy that I did something that I really enjoyed doing and I hope that it will continue this way! 😃

If you want to follow along my YouTube journey, you can subscribe to my channel. More crazy challenges are coming! 😉

In the meantime... Happy coding! 😇