How to learn Java if you are already over 30 ...

Dossier

• Who: Artem Panasyuk
• Worked for: unemployed, previously - system administrator and head of the department for the operation of the city Internet network
• Place of residence: Ulyanovsk, Russia
• Age at the start of learning Java: 35
• First job as a programmer: 9 months after starting studies
• Original success story

Just think, 30 with a ponytail, this is not a reason to write yourself off as scrap and consider yourself unsuitable for training. Setting a goal, solving puzzles, filtering and absorbing information - that's what you need if you really want to become a programmer. At the age of 35, Artem, being a family man with two children, managed to master Java, find a job and quickly outgrow the level of "joon".

Goal set

I set myself the goal of learning Java in 1 year. The complexity of this task was aggravated by the presence of two children ( 0.5 years and 4 years ), the lack of work at that time, and, by age. At that time I was 35 , and this seemed to me the main problem. For the most truthful picture, I’ll say that there were pluses - a background in the form of a physics diploma, experience as a system administrator, experience in creating websites ( HTML + CSS ), as well as 5 years of work in a large telecommunications company (head of the urban Internet network operation department). Nevertheless, there was essentially no direct programming experience, except for Basic at school and TurboPascal at the university.

Study and interview

I was inspired, firstly, by the loss of a job, and secondly, by the blog of one "colleague in misfortune." Around the end of January 2015, I came across Java Rush - and away we go ... When I started studying, I bought " Java Philosophy " by Bruce Eckel. By April, I had passed the first 10 levels and solved almost all the tasks . I was lucky: just then, a promotion started on CodeGym, and I bought a subscription. By August, I had completed about 23-25 ​​lecture levels and about 20 task levels. I went on vacation for two weeks and received an invitation for an interview at the only large company in my area. I worked out an approximate list of questions in advance, and it bore fruit: I passed the technical interview normally. It took about 40 minutescommunication via Skype . The second step was writing a test task. Just the list of technologies that I needed to use horrified me: JSF + Primefaces , Hibernate , Java7 , PostgreSQL , Glassfish ... And among the additional, sort of like "optional" technologies, there were JUnit and Maven . I needed to write a typical CRUDweb application "Online Library" with the ability to authorize and manage user roles. At that time, I did not have a clear understanding of Java EE, but do not back down at the last moment! In 2 weeks, I did build something that seemed to me to fully meet the set requirements (except for unit tests). To my surprise, almost the same day I sent the assignment for review, they called me back and made a job offer. So I became a Java Junior Developer.

One year later

At the moment ( March 2016 ) the probationary period is over, as are a lot of worries and doubts. But now, a year later, I can confidently say that I have never regretted the money spent, time, or effort. What do you wish!

And almost a year later :)

My story of mastering the heights of Java continues and continues today ( December 2016 ). Here's what I did in a year: I successfully completed three months of probation by the beginning of 2016 . In fact, it was a daily horror, especially after wiping someone else's commit or sudden conflicts during a rebase in Git .

1. I got a job as a Java developer at Simbirsoft . The company develops software to order and helps in the selection of a team for development. My first project needed Java 8, JavaEE , SSO , Hibernate , JSF , PrimeFaces , Liquibase , Postgres , Maven . Wildfly9 was used as an application server . After a couple of months, I moved on to the next project.


2. For 4-5 months I was the only developer of the backend part of the microservice. Based on the pool of technologies that I listed above, I created a new application from scratch. Its peculiarity is that the widget written by the Frontend developer ( AngularJs ) “ communicated ” with the Backend using REST technology .


3. In October 2016, I successfully passed the Oracle Java 8 OCA exam .


4. After intensive preparation for the interview, I got a position as a developer on an external project . The stack is something like this: Java 6 , Spring , Hibernate , JSP , Liquibase , OracleDB , Maven . This is where I work now.


5. The range of tasks is quite wide - from writing a script to update the database structure ( Oracle ) and changing the JSP layout to display new fields, to creating new entities and creating a DTO to "drag" new fields to display from the DAO layer .

Afterword

I want to thank the project team for helping to lay a solid practical foundation for my career. This foundation helped me quickly go through a difficult and winding path from " junior " to "simple" developer. And on the way from one point to another, I repeatedly returned to the course in order to flip through this or that topic again. The fact that in the second half of the course there were a lot of lectures helped in mastering the technologies, in which it was constantly drummed that you need to use Google and any sources of information (books, video tutorials). The ability to " squeeze out " information is a key skill to grow professionally in software development. PS : Despite the fact that he got a job after 20with something of the course levels, if you have the opportunity - don't do it! For 3 months of probation turned out to be one big stress for me. The first step was to learn Git in a couple of weekends, and constantly had to fill knowledge gaps. In this regard, I continued to take the CodeGym course until I won. So taking the course all the way and then getting a job is a much more sensible idea. But my path was more tortuous.