Hi all! It just so happens that I've been out of my probation for quite some time now, but (surprisingly) finding the time to write is not so easy anymore. I'll start from the very beginning. My name is Michael, I am 27 years old. I want to say right away that I do not have a higher education (in the process of finding a job, this played a role - someone might say that it played a cruel joke on me, but for me it rather rendered a service), although I have three institutes behind me. After school, I entered the Belarusian National Technical University, but did not even start studying. He moved to Moscow, entered a little-known economic university for marketing and advertising, studied for one semester and dropped out. After that, he entered the Ostankino Institute for the specialty "Sound Engineering", where he overcame two courses. So, you can say that before becoming a developer, I was a sound engineer. My career in this area has developed rapidly and transiently - by the second year of work, I realized that it is rather problematic to grow somewhere else in this area. After leaving sound engineering, I worked in advertising for two years, where I also came to understand that my development in this area was over - I didn’t become a creative, and you don’t need to think a lot of metrics - it’s boring. Thus, in September 2016, I entered with a work book in my hands and a reserve of funds for about six months. Here it is worth paying tribute to one sensational resource about the training of programmers - its marketers have instilled in me the confidence that I, as a pretty smart guy, can easily learn to be a programmer in just half a year. Thus, I identified my goal and restructured my life so that nothing would prevent it from being achieved. Studying on this resource turned out to be meaningless in terms of professional skills, so after the second webinar I realized that a different approach was needed. Fortunately, thanks to fellow students, I discovered two absolutely wonderful resources: the Stepik platform and the one on which you are reading this. At the end of September, I started taking a course on CodeGym while also taking courses that I found useful on stepik: discrete mathematics, a course on java, and several courses on algorithms and data structures. By the end of October, I finished part of the courses, completed 10 free levels on CodeGym, and then sat in the mountains for about a month, not really bothering about anything other than survival. You also need to rest. In December, I returned to training with fresh energy. At the end of December, I bought a subscription and galloped through the levels. by February, a beautiful and neat number "40" appeared next to my profile picture. Overboard, I left 7 tasks, of which 6 at that time did not give up to the validator, and I was completely reluctant to deal with one. At this point, I should have started looking for a job, especially since my modest savings had come to an end. However, I found it necessary to master Git, Maven, Gradle, deal with SQL, get an idea about Spring. It seemed to me that I got used to the git in a couple of days (in the working environment, in fact, I had to repeat everything over again), I realized maven at a basic level rather intuitively, I took a pretty good course on Udemy on Gradle, pulled up SQL on sql-ex , in spring I read the book Spring in Action (more than enough to start). With this modest store of knowledge, I began my job search in early April. The first interview took place two weeks later. Before that, I did a test task that was outrageously similar to the test task before the JR internship (which I also did, although I did not go to the internship in the end). At the interview, I realized two things: firstly, I am completely unable to explain elementary things in words, and secondly, I fairly set the bar for myself - in fact, all the questions at the interview were devoted only to Core (and literally a couple of questions about SQL). The interview, however, went well, and they agreed to consider my candidacy. However, two weeks later, I still did not receive a clear answer from them (everyone asked to wait a bit, apparently, they looked at other candidates). In the end, I gave up on them and continued the search. Naturally, I visited Sbertech (like many JR graduates), by that moment I had thoroughly improved my skill in answering questions, so the interview went perfectly, but in the end it turned out that they couldn’t hire me without a higher education. It was pretty annoying, but it's for the best, I'm somehow convinced that working in the banking sector is a stigma for life. The third interview got me to where I am now. It was a non-standard interview, they asked me just a couple of questions about Core, they asked Spring more (and, at a fairly deep level, about the life cycle of beans, aspects, spring mvc), something about Groovy. In Java, they also asked non-standard ones, for example, how the StringBuilder is arranged from the inside, where the hashcode is stored when it is calculated. There were questions about JavaScript (I also learned it casually in the most general terms), a few puzzles. Overall, I answered about half of the questions and left the interview disappointed. However, the next day I received an offer, with a salary that I did not even dare to dream of at the first job. It was the end of April - a little over 8 months had passed since I found out how a class differs from an object. The company is called MASTERDATA, it is a major integrator of SAP, 1C, Hybris and other enterprise solutions. I ended up in the E-commerce department, we develop websites for online stores. Many write that from the first day they got to the forefront of a new project and began to write hundreds of lines of code. I was not like that. For the first month I did about the same thing as at home - I sat and studied, however, already more targeted. I pulled JQuery, Apache Solr, MQ, Velocity, delved into MVC, learned Groovy. I touched on quite exotic technologies, like JBoss Drools. A month later, I started writing a REST API in one person to integrate our current project with a partner site. Along the way, I studied various modules of the project (in order to understand the scale of the tragedy, the project has nearly 10 million lines of code, not counting the front and configurations). At the moment I know about 10% of the project. A new stage of development will start soon, we will make two new sites for the current client. Of course, it is worth saying that I did not regret my decision for a minute - programming turned out to be so much my occupation that it seems that I can do it without breaks for sleep and food. In conclusion, a few tips for everyone who goes to a high goal:
Keep in mind that you will have to study all your life. You will never be a good enough developer. First of all, learn to learn. Learn to google, learn to ask questions correctly, learn to enjoy the process of learning.
Second - find the right balance between physical and mental labor. Watch your posture, do not slouch at the computer, warm up regularly, start going to the gym (the harmonious development of your body is also a whole art, do not rush into this pool thoughtlessly, otherwise you will only cripple yourself. It is better to work out with a trainer, but only if there is a good If there is no good, then the best (perhaps the only) source of knowledge on health training is the ru_healthlife livejournal community). If it seems to you that this has nothing to do with the case, you are mistaken. Physical activity in the most positive way affects mental activity as well.
Third, stop motivating yourself. The resource of motivation and will of each person is very limited. Yes, some have more, some have less, but sooner or later it will end one way or another. Discipline matters. Start studying at the same time every day. 5 minutes or 5 hours - it's not so important, the main thing is to do what is necessary. And the result will not keep you waiting.
That's all, thanks for your attention. Good luck to all!
It just so happens that I've been out of my probation for quite some time now, but (surprisingly) finding the time to write is not so easy anymore. I'll start from the very beginning. My name is Michael, I am 27 years old. I want to say right away that I do not have a higher education (in the process of finding a job, this played a role - someone might say that it played a cruel joke on me, but for me it rather rendered a service), although I have three institutes behind me. After school, I entered the Belarusian National Technical University, but did not even start studying. He moved to Moscow, entered a little-known economic university for marketing and advertising, studied for one semester and dropped out. After that, he entered the Ostankino Institute for the specialty "Sound Engineering", where he overcame two courses. So, you can say that before becoming a developer, I was a sound engineer. My career in this area has developed rapidly and transiently - by the second year of work, I realized that it is rather problematic to grow somewhere else in this area. After leaving sound engineering, I worked in advertising for two years, where I also came to understand that my development in this area was over - I didn’t become a creative, and you don’t need to think a lot of metrics - it’s boring. Thus, in September 2016, I entered with a work book in my hands and a reserve of funds for about six months. Here it is worth paying tribute to one sensational resource about the training of programmers - its marketers have instilled in me the confidence that I, as a pretty smart guy, can easily learn to be a programmer in just half a year. Thus, I identified my goal and restructured my life so that nothing would prevent it from being achieved. Studying on this resource turned out to be meaningless in terms of professional skills, so after the second webinar I realized that a different approach was needed. Fortunately, thanks to fellow students, I discovered two absolutely wonderful resources: the Stepik platform and the one on which you are reading this. At the end of September, I started taking a course on CodeGym while also taking courses that I found useful on stepik: discrete mathematics, a course on java, and several courses on algorithms and data structures. By the end of October, I finished part of the courses, completed 10 free levels on CodeGym, and then sat in the mountains for about a month, not really bothering about anything other than survival. You also need to rest. In December, I returned to training with fresh energy. At the end of December, I bought a subscription and galloped through the levels. by February, a beautiful and neat number "40" appeared next to my profile picture. Overboard, I left 7 tasks, of which 6 at that time did not give up to the validator, and I was completely reluctant to deal with one. 
At this point, I should have started looking for a job, especially since my modest savings had come to an end. However, I found it necessary to master Git, Maven, Gradle, deal with SQL, get an idea about Spring. It seemed to me that I got used to the git in a couple of days (in the working environment, in fact, I had to repeat everything over again), I realized maven at a basic level rather intuitively, I took a pretty good course on Udemy on Gradle, pulled up SQL on sql-ex , in spring I read the book Spring in Action (more than enough to start). With this modest store of knowledge, I began my job search in early April. The first interview took place two weeks later. Before that, I did a test task that was outrageously similar to the test task before the JR internship (which I also did, although I did not go to the internship in the end). At the interview, I realized two things: firstly, I am completely unable to explain elementary things in words, and secondly, I fairly set the bar for myself - in fact, all the questions at the interview were devoted only to Core (and literally a couple of questions about SQL). The interview, however, went well, and they agreed to consider my candidacy. However, two weeks later, I still did not receive a clear answer from them (everyone asked to wait a bit, apparently, they looked at other candidates). In the end, I gave up on them and continued the search. Naturally, I visited Sbertech (like many JR graduates), by that moment I had thoroughly improved my skill in answering questions, so the interview went perfectly, but in the end it turned out that they couldn’t hire me without a higher education. It was pretty annoying, but it's for the best, I'm somehow convinced that working in the banking sector is a stigma for life. The third interview got me to where I am now. It was a non-standard interview, they asked me just a couple of questions about Core, they asked Spring more (and, at a fairly deep level, about the life cycle of beans, aspects, spring mvc), something about Groovy. In Java, they also asked non-standard ones, for example, how the StringBuilder is arranged from the inside, where the hashcode is stored when it is calculated. There were questions about JavaScript (I also learned it casually in the most general terms), a few puzzles. Overall, I answered about half of the questions and left the interview disappointed. However, the next day I received an offer, with a salary that I did not even dare to dream of at the first job. It was the end of April - a little over 8 months had passed since I found out how a class differs from an object. The company is called MASTERDATA, it is a major integrator of SAP, 1C, Hybris and other enterprise solutions. I ended up in the E-commerce department, we develop websites for online stores. Many write that from the first day they got to the forefront of a new project and began to write hundreds of lines of code. I was not like that. For the first month I did about the same thing as at home - I sat and studied, however, already more targeted. I pulled JQuery, Apache Solr, MQ, Velocity, delved into MVC, learned Groovy. I touched on quite exotic technologies, like JBoss Drools. A month later, I started writing a REST API in one person to integrate our current project with a partner site. Along the way, I studied various modules of the project (in order to understand the scale of the tragedy, the project has nearly 10 million lines of code, not counting the front and configurations). At the moment I know about 10% of the project. A new stage of development will start soon, we will make two new sites for the current client. Of course, it is worth saying that I did not regret my decision for a minute - programming turned out to be so much my occupation that it seems that I can do it without breaks for sleep and food. In conclusion, a few tips for everyone who goes to a high goal:
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