Comment by kp98 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kp98 | Hacker News Reader

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I was recently transitionally homeless for about 3-4 months. Over that period I slept on over 20 couches, floors, and beds. The closest I got to sleeping on the street were 2 times when I had no where to sleep after 4 pm and no one to reach out to. There was one other time when I got locked out of a sort of half way house. Anyways I went to an elite college and couldn’t afford to continue after both my parents went bankrupt and divorced, my mom had a mental breakdown and suffered psychosis while we ate from the food bank.

Long story short, your circumstance right now doesn’t define your future at all, you have to be relentless in your effort to get out of your position right now. I developed a portfolio of two websites and a highly complex mobile app that I launched with a full scale backend, it included redis , sockets , MySQL , and ELB AWS.

I’m not in a position to give a job but I can encourage you and be a reminder that it is possible. My advice is to never look back, be relentless in portfolio building and applying to jobs. These days I have a full time mobile development job, working on my second app, and have enough savings to pay to continue my school + my current company is encouraging me and helping me finish my degree.

Do let me know if u have any questions or anything specific you need advice on

Thank you, that's inspirational. I am currently learning Java and considering work in mobile development, ideally once I finish learning Java or do I need to spend additional time learning Kotlin as well? In other words is Java enough to work as a mobile developer? Also what's the best book or written MOOC to use and learn mobile development from start to finish?

That’s a great question, I’d say with the rise of Asia so many companies are targeting android and so Java engineers are arguably more in demand than swift engineers, I’ve heard a number of engineers say this and it’s consistent with my experience in the job market. So in my experience I’d say that java will be enough. As far as the best book focused on mobile I’m not exactly sure, because I learned through trial and error on my personal project and primarily through react native documentation - though I had a few years experience prior in python development. I’ve heard people recommend the book android development for dummies which is about 300 pages, but I’ve always believed the best way to learn to program is through trial and error on personal projects + by the end you’ll have something to show an employer, and over time your skills will get refined, especially working in a professional organization I’ve seen my skills increase exponentially

One thing I’d give guidance on is there’s no real “finish line” to learning something like Java. You’re on a journey from an apprentice to a master.

I somewhat routinely hire people to work on Java codebases that have 10+ years working in Python or C, or other alternative languages, and only a very small amount of professional experience in Java. Decent developers tend to be fairly adaptable and can ramp into a new language or new technologies. I’m looking for people who are passionate and skilled at their craft.

Some questions which might come up in entry-level interview:

What kind of things do you like to build? What are one or two things you’ve built and are proud about, how did you build them, why did those get you excited, what were the key challenges you had to solve? Given your educational background isn’t CS, what got you into writing software, why do you want to make a career of it? What do you see yourself doing in 5 years time, are you excited about backend / distributed systems, mobile, frontend development?

You likely want a LinkedIn profile and a GitHub account. Contributions to open source projects would be viewed incredibly positively.

Interviewing at some companies may involve writing code to solve a problem on a whiteboard or a provided laptop under time constraints, you can practice for that on sites like Leetcode.

I don’t have any U.K. roles which would suit you but I’m happy to spend an hour talking to you, doing a mock interview, whatever would help you. Email address is in my profile.

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