3 courses that landed me my first freelance job

The more advanced you become the less likely it is that you will learn from video courses, at the start of my coding journey this was the only method I could actually do.

This is what I recommend for every beginner, videos require less mental energy, and the concepts get absorbed better and faster. Throughout my learning journey, I’ve completed 10s of courses, but the three courses mentioned in this article are the ones that made all the difference when it came to landing a job. Video courses are not the only resource I used when learning to code, but they sure were the best ones.

This is the first video course I took after learning the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS. It’s a comprehensive guide by Max from Academind. And this is the course I recommend you take after you have some basic web knowledge.

The reason I recommend starting to learn NodeJS first is that it’s the backbone of each and every framework you will ever use as a JavaScript developer. Max starts with the MVC principle, which has been around forever, and in my opinion, it’s a crucial thing to understand for any aspiring web developer.

He then goes on to REST APIs and Graphql, and along the way, you will be building real-life projects which will consolidate the concepts he’s explaining.

For me, this course took about 8 - 12 weeks to finish, and yes I did the whole thing from start to finish, while learning I was building my own application, which was improved upon every time I learned something new. Building this application was the key to success and because of it, I was able to understand everything much deeper.

Because I loved Max’s node course I decided to buy his React course, and it exceeded my expectations.

There are a bunch of other React courses, main reason I decided to go with this one, is because I was already used to his teaching style, and I expected to understand the concepts easier if they came from him. The course starts out with class-based React coding, which lately has been largely replaced by hooks (functional-based React), if you’re a beginner I suggest you learn both approaches, but focus more on the hooks thing. I say this because most likely that’s how things are going to be done at work.

If you had taken the previous course, and you already have some NodeJs knowledge, I would suggest that you combine both of the courses together, and create an API that would serve data, create a React app and connect it with that API.

These days to start working professionally as a front-end dev you would surely need framework on top of React, since NextJs has won the battle between the frameworks on top of react, it’s what I recommend.

Wes Bos has created a fantastic course and without this course I wouldn’t have landed the long-term client I have right now. All those things you learned in the previous 2 courses are now comined in this one, in which you will build a real-life e-commerce app, not only will you learn to connect the front to the backend.

You will learn thing like:

After completing these courses, and building a couple of personal projects, I was able to land a job on Upwork. My learning journey took about 1 year, for you it might be different, and you could probably do it faster, if you want to read more about my whole journey click here.

Good luck.