 So I recently made a video detailing my 20 plus years as a self-taught software developer and my experiences along the way. So I've had some questions about my advice, like what I would tell someone if they're just getting out of school and they're looking for that first job, or maybe they are looking at doing a boot camp, trying to find a job in tech, or maybe they're a junior dev and they're wanting to up their skills, maybe become a senior dev or something like that. What would I say to them? I would say that the thing that you need to get a job anywhere is experience, sadly. You can only get experience by doing the work, and if no one's going to hire you to do the work without the experience of doing the work, you're just going to have to create things on your own, or you're going to have to try to find some contract work or something like that to kind of build this portfolio of experience. And I don't mean just like a bunch of to-do app type things like where you're just following tutorials and copy-pasting code, I mean like actually architecting a solution of some kind and being able to talk about it the way that it works and why you made the choices that you made. Those things are going to be very important in an interview once you even get to that stage. But now that we've got the experience requirement out of the way, let's talk about how you are going to get some of that experience. So one of the big things over the past few years has been a boot camp. I know several people who have taken a six-month, nine-month long boot camp, paid a few thousand dollars, went through a program with a group of people, got a certificate, and got a job. I mean that actually worked for a lot of people. That was a great way for them to be able to self-study their way into a software development job. I know other people who didn't do boot camps, they just did the self-study, used YouTube videos or just online courses on their own and they were able to get enough knowledge to be able to have a successful interview and actually land a job. Those dates are probably over for most people right now. I don't know that many companies would be hiring people straight out of boot camps these days without some other type of experience that you've got that you can actually show. Now coming out of school, probably a different thing because you've got two to four years of experience of building some types of things. You have the experience of doing some type of projects like that. That's valuable even if it's not exactly the projects that a company would be hiring you to work for. At least you've got some type of experience there that they can lean on. You'll notice I keep coming back to the word experience because in my mind that is really the difference between a beginner, a junior dev, and moving up the ladder to a senior dev. If you want to be a senior dev you need to build experience. You need to know how to debug things. You know what code is not going to work before you even waste any time trying to write it. These are only things that you can get by actually doing them. You can only read so much. You can only learn from other people's experiences so much until you actually have to get your own. That's a very, very important part of this. My advice to you is if you really want to be a software developer you need to basically make it your life these days. You need to spend a lot of time learning everything that you can learn and really not try to learn everything but learn a lot about a few different things. If you want to be a front end dev and you know you want to work in React, learn React. Build a few things with React. Learn that ecosystem. If you want to do Vue.js or if you want to do something else angular then you need to find what you like about those things and get some experience doing them. Also look at the job market to see what's available in your area or what you would be willing to do. Look at those things. If you want to do some more back end development you know you may want to look at Python or Go or Node.js maybe there's there's several those things to get started with but really you want to learn like Java or C sharp or something like that to really work on the larger companies back end systems. Those things are not as easy to get started with quickly and they take a little bit more time to kind of get your projects going with those types of things but you know at least understanding how the front end works versus the back end and the back end talks to a database and then maybe any other event management stuff that's going on in the back end with messaging you want to know how those things work and be able to kind of talk about those things whether you've actually worked on a large system or not you need to be able to understand how those larger systems work. So on this channel I'll be making quite a few videos about that type of stuff so that you guys can learn that learn from my experiences of you know how my applications have worked in the past and how I've seen other applications work we'll talk a bit about that so if you want to learn more about that type of stuff make sure that you subscribe and give this video a like if it's helpful to you in any way and check out some of the other videos on the channel. All right cool so I guess we'll just leave it at that and just remember experience get out there and do it you can't just always talk about it or always watch videos you actually have to start building some things and you know create that GitHub account start putting some things out there start looking at other people's GitHub repos and understanding what they're doing and how they're putting those things together and just start building things on your own even if you fail the first few times even if they don't work even if it's total crap it's fine it just the first few things I wrote were the first many many things I wrote were total crap and probably even today still total crap but you just have to do it you just have to get the experience you have to break things you have to debug them you have to figure out where you went wrong and all of that's going to make you a much better developer.