My most recent ex was in probably the top 5%+, I never asked them about their financials obviously, but just looking at their mansion and their friend's mansions one can assume. I remember her parents talking about what they would do in the event that the Coronavirus went pandemic back in January before we broke up (coincidence???).
* They have "nannies" and other people that are on a payroll to send out into the world to get supplies; this way no one in the immediate family will become sick. The food or things would be left outside and the nannies would stay in a separate garage apartment as to not risk contaminating them.
* They live in a gated community so if crap were to really hit the fan then people would have to be really serious about breaking in and dealing with the potential armed guards of other mega rich(er) families. I laughed at this idea, people getting armed guards for this??? Guess it's a possibility...
* Their mansion has another gate/fence that surrounds the house that can be electrified, a few back up generators, typical doomsday prep stuff, etc
* They had a few daughters going to colleges in other states, they called them all back way before colleges announced they were going online
* Three guard dogs so if anyone tries to break in they have to go through them...
* Probably much more that they didn't enlighten me to lol
Granted all these points depend on if the parents don't get sick. They're both doctors so they work on the front line in some capacity. Not my concern anymore though so I wish them the best of luck! The first point made me lose a decent amount of respect for them. Smart, but sadistic to pay others to put themselves in harms way.
Webdriver.io has been pretty good with onboarding QA engineers. wdio-cli, install additional services plug and play, excellent documentation to the point where very low coding experience QA can get a project up and running easily.
They have a Gitter also that is one of the more active I've seen. I see people from other OS projects come and ask questions because they're more likely to get a faster response in wdio's than other OS.
Pending on what company you're working for you may be able to find a younger software engineer to take you on as a mentor. I say younger because the seniors that I have worked with have a ton of useful knowledge, but don't know how to dumb it down to be digestible for a complete beginner and end up completely overloading me with obfuscated words and acronyms. This is just my experience though so don't let that stop you from reaching out to a senior engineer.
This way you can set up an:
Accountability system -- as good as having HN or freecodecamp's Twitter beat you up for missing a day on the 100 day's of code challenge there is nothing more efficient than having someone in person that you can go to for help when you're blocked and begin to burn out after a difficult hurdle. This will also help you out in determining which end of the stack you want to end up in. It's so easy nowaday for everyone online to say "I wanna be a fullstack unicorn so I make the big bucks!!!!" ,but then you just end up being mediocre at 2 things, rather than focusing on front end or back end and really excelling in that area. A mentor will help you figure out what you're actually interested in and keep you focused.
Code review -- Not only will having a mentor help teach you best ENTERPRISE practices, but they could give you other ways to think of solutions rather than going onto a Udemy class where the instructor types some code and you regurgitate then eventually get stuck in tutorial hell. I uppercased enterprise here because most online courses teach you the easiest, least secure, and just show me a working website as fast as possible. That doesn't translate well into the professional world.
Way into a junior role -- This is the big one. If you truly stick with learning web dev and your mentor sticks with you and sees potential then you will have an easy way out of customer service. You won't be paid as much as if you had transitioned to a new company, because that is how our HR overlords work, but you'll have something that differentiates you from other self taught web dev's. Real world experience and references to boot.
Create something that helps solve an inconvenience to you!
Example being, for me whenever I go to Wegmans I can't find what I need. Therefore, I went on their website and found out I can scrape the location / price of food per each of their stores. So I'm working on a little personal application that helps create a shopping list with the location in store and price of food that I want to buy, but I'm making it in a way so that it works for all of their stores just in case I decide to deploy it.
Simple things like that are awesome ideas. Don't go for ideas like creating a new social media app that will compete with Facebook or Instagram...I mean those are still good portfolio builders since it gives you an opportunity to fullstack, but don't really bring anything new and out there to the table.
You can also go to nearby businesses and ask if they need a website, or better yet don't even ask them and just create the website. Then when you get something nice looking you can walk in and let them know about it and see if they're interested in buying it or using it.
I second the Beyerdynamic DT770 Pros. I've been using them for the past 3 years in the workplace and they work wonders. If you really want to go overboard with them, and care about excellent sound quality, I suggest getting a DAC and tube eventually.
You could just run lighthouse on your app periodically for an in depth audit on your site. That way you wouldn't need to slow down your builds with a test (not sure what's best practice here. Just trying to throw out some basic ideas)
- Watch 1 or 2 Udemy videos for the basics and easy feet wetting (I suggest Traversy/Colt Steele/Maximillian)
- Begin a small application, only use documentation on language, framework, or library you're using. I.E if you're using React rely on stack overflow and React documentation for help.
- css-tricks.com (I suggest their flex box and css grid documentation)
- Use land-book.com/Dribbble/collectUI/unDraw/ManyPixels for web app UI/UX ideas (these are top notch apps to emulate. If you can emulate them then you're doing good.)
This way you fall out of the ever so easy tutorial purgatory so many self taught devs find themselves in nowadays. Force yourself out of your comfort zone and you will learn. This is just the beginning :) took me a year and a half to find these resources, but I hope these resources help expedite your learning to the next level
Have you deployed your app to production yet and is it downloadable/purchasable from the App store or play store? Companies love hearing about live applications and how you've maintained them to meet client needs or responded to a production level bug fast. That will also give you metrics to show off more than just here are a few play apps that I made and have sitting in localhost.
Also it will show future interviewers that you know how to deploy a Cordova app which will raise your marketability even more; at least from what I've heard deploying to Apple is a pain in the butt. More so than to Google since that's the wild west.
* They have "nannies" and other people that are on a payroll to send out into the world to get supplies; this way no one in the immediate family will become sick. The food or things would be left outside and the nannies would stay in a separate garage apartment as to not risk contaminating them.
* They live in a gated community so if crap were to really hit the fan then people would have to be really serious about breaking in and dealing with the potential armed guards of other mega rich(er) families. I laughed at this idea, people getting armed guards for this??? Guess it's a possibility...
* Their mansion has another gate/fence that surrounds the house that can be electrified, a few back up generators, typical doomsday prep stuff, etc
* They had a few daughters going to colleges in other states, they called them all back way before colleges announced they were going online
* Three guard dogs so if anyone tries to break in they have to go through them...
* Probably much more that they didn't enlighten me to lol
Granted all these points depend on if the parents don't get sick. They're both doctors so they work on the front line in some capacity. Not my concern anymore though so I wish them the best of luck! The first point made me lose a decent amount of respect for them. Smart, but sadistic to pay others to put themselves in harms way.