As a professional coder, it’s important to develop your skills and boost your confidence. Follow these three tips to help advance your career and increase your confidence.
How many times have you heard someone say “Confidence is key?” Sure, this little phrase is viewed as a cliché, but there’s a valuable lesson hidden in this small string of words. Confidence can improve your life on many levels – including your career.
As a professional coder, you know there are plenty of challenges out there that we all have to overcome. The key to getting past these obstacles is confidence, skill and hard work. If you learn how to use these resources to your advantage, you’ll soon find you have more confidence than you ever thought possible.
Follow these three tips to boost your coding confidence and advance your career.
Build a portfolio
As a professional looking to improve your confidence, one of the first things you should do is create a portfolio. Take a deep breath. It’s not going to be perfect at first; you need to give yourself time to grow.
There are several websites out there that can help you build a coding portfolio. Many coders, including both newbies and veterans, use CodePen as their go-to portfolio for front-end development. The benefits of this resource will become evident after just a few short hours on the site.
You’ll be able to go in and use a wide range of JavasScript, HTML and CSS flavors to build and develop code from scratch. It’s important to have options when you’re building your portfolio. Showcasing your versatility and different strengths makes you a more enticing job candidate.
Make meaningful connections
Another excellent way to improve your confidence as a coder is by making connections. When you meet people who work in the same business, you’ll discover you both have a lot to learn. Interacting with others and hearing how they work, what they use and listening to how they got started can really get your juices flowing.
Positivity breeds confidence, and you can improve your coding confidence by joining a community such as GitHub. Websites like GitHub allow users to upload their coding creations so other coders can view, comment and interact with their projects. It’s a fantastic way to meet new people and learn more about this interesting and complex line of work. GitHub even offers a repository so you can experiment on existing code without fear of damaging your already functioning projects.
Knowledge is power
In our line of work, things are always changing. It’s crucial that you have the latest information at your fingertips.
You might want to consider going to a website like TreeHouse to touch up on your coding skills. Businesses like TreeHouse offer classes on a wide range of coding topics, which allows you to brush up on your skills or learn a new coding skill set altogether.
Many of these classes offer an in-house program you can experiment with as you learn new information during the lessons. By the time you finish the class and get your certificate, you’ll have a strong sense of confidence knowing that you’re up-to-date on the latest coding information, and you’ve had hands-on experience that you can demonstrate in your portfolio.
Becoming a more confident coder isn’t something that happens overnight, but with hard work and dedication, you can walk into an interview anywhere with your head held high. Get out there and show what you can do.
