Probably one of the biggest things I keep hearing from people from the meet ups I am attending is “I keep getting told I don’t have enough experience.”

Now I have to admit that experience can be gained in the workplace, but the great thing about coding is that you can gain and create your own experience. Here are a few tips on how you can create your own experience.

WordPress:

Build your own plugins and or WordPress themes. I really don’t know any easier way to say it; however, you can build and start posting on wordpress.org and get them officially made. Most people don’t want to take the time to build their own plugins, but sometimes in order to gain experience you have to. This will help build your portfolio.

Another thing I always tell people to do is to create their own themes, it’s very easy to get started. To do so, start by adding features and custom stuff to your WordPress theme. Keep building it and updating it. This will help you with aiding future clients when they want to continue to buy support from you and pay you to upkeep it. Learn about continuing to push out stable builds of WordPress themes. I believe this will be the biggest help building your experience even if you don’t have any idea to begin with. We all have to start somewhere.

Email Marketing:

Now this is something you can do and build more with. There are many different email marketing clients out there, from the most used like MailChimp, to the more corporate clients such as Pardot. I would suggest putting these email templates out there and just leave like a credit to yourself. It will help people recognize who built these templates.

CodePen:

For those of you who don’t know what CodePen is, think of it like a place where you can leave ideas. Did you build a cool JavaScript rollover function? You can leave for others to use, or you can ask for help on ideas, or you can test them yourself. The CodePen community is very helpful, and it’s a great place for developers to leave some great ideas and share their code with each other.

Git & Frameworks:

I always find it weird how sometimes people will use frameworks and then complain about how it doesn’t do something they want it to do. Why not get involved with building it? I am not talking about flaming the creators. Instead, maybe offering some helpful insight or maybe trying to build something into it yourself.

In Closing…

I would compare developing and coding as to any profession, if you want to cook, you practice and you probably burn a few omelets along the way. If you want to be a mechanic, you probably took apart a car to see how everything works. This is just like that; however, on the net you can find the code boards, and the people who are willing to share knowledge. Being told you have no experience isn’t really something that should turn you away. Just make your own experience.

Now for something like salesforce, or Shopify or big commerce, I would suggest making a trial account, using it for that trial period and download the theme and just play with whatever it is and see who, what, how and why it works. Undeniably messing with something and seeing the ins and outs of the frameworks help with gaining that experience. I have met many developers who will not mess with anything outside of what they want to do and are not willing to try and learn something new in order to add growth to their portfolio. Well I suggest you go the other way and just have fun with what you are building and learning. Currently I am learning Swift. Each error, each failed build is a lesson and experience. I can use what I am learning and take it into the real world. I will probably be blogging about the errors I run into and blog about the app I am building for fun. Anyways, until next time.

 

see you space cowboy…

 

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