I can't imagine how it was trying to self-learn how to code before the Internet. You could rely just on books, but as we know, they can be a) pretty expensive and b) quite difficult to follow without any interactive examples.
But right now, a wannabe developer faces the exact opposite issue: there's quite a lot of material available to start your journey. How do you decide what's the best fit for you?
Just to share my personal experience, I started with Codecademy, then switched to freeCodeCamp, fell in love with Scrimba, and all that just before trying the selections for the 42 school in Florence (but that's a story for another time...).
Actually, the first good memory of my learning process has to be credited to the Bad Website Club. It started as a free bootcamp based on the (now retired) Responsive Web Design curricula by freeCodeCamp. Jessica Rose was an amazing teacher who helped me start making sense of web development, and it only got better when Carmen Huidobro joined her in the second edition, taking care of the JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures section. I remember seeing her struggle at some point during one of the JS algorithm exercises and having my first coding-related epiphany: even experienced professionals can still struggle with code, and that's perfectly normal.
Oh, and they also had a lot of super interesting guests. I remember some amazing talks by the likes of Barbara Oakley, Bruce Lawson, Miguel Useche, Felienne Hermans, Rizèl Scarlett, and Stuart Langridge. For me, my love for development started with them.
I can't express how happy I am to have started my Penetration Tester journey on Hack the Box. Everything is so challenging and well explained that you immediately get that feeling of "uh, I'm starting to get good at this" every time you manage to conquer one of their flags using the different techniques you've just learned. This week, I've mostly experimented with privilege escalation on Linux, and it was incredibly cool!
Plus, next week I have an interview for a possible six-month internship as a back-end developer. Cross your fingers for me, if you'd like.
Something to read: Tommi Parrish - Men I Trust
Something to listen to: Mythic Sunship - Light/Flux
Something to watch: L'Histoire de Souleymane
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