My name is Bashir. I'm a mobile developer. Read my story and find out how to get in IT without a college degree.
Preface
Hi there! My name is Bashir. I’m 23 y.o. I am an IOS developer at a large IT company. I’ve been working as a developer for two years, and I’ve already worked at four companies. I have a college degree in the banking sphere and an unfinished higher education. So, let me explain how it all started.
Academic background
I finished school and moved to Moscow to get a banking education at the Moscow banking school under the Bank of Russia where I was studying four years. That was the time when I realized that programming is my strong suit. I agree, it’s not the most typical way to get to it. At college, I enjoyed solving mathematical tasks. I did it quite well. Then, I decided to try programming, and I started learning C++ .
(I just want to mention that the only programming experience I had was studying Pascal at school.)
I didn’t start learning programming with a book. I used a few websites to take this path. Of course, after passing a few lessons, I got confused and I quit. It went repeatedly. I was sure that there was no chance to master programming without a university. A little later, after I got hired at the bank in a support team in 2018, I met and got to talk to many developers there. It turned out that only one of them had a proper academic degree. Others took courses and studied on their own.
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I got really inspired and decided to change my approach to self-education. At first, I decided to read two books:
- Programming Ruby
This book gave me an understanding of object-oriented programming. It took me two weeks to complete and fully understand the material.
- Ruby on Rails Tutorial
The second one was a bit more difficult. There were many professional terms that I didn’t know back then. This book took me 4 MONTHS to finish. Then, I realized that I didn’t manage to work as a support specialist and study programming as much as I wanted simultaneously.
How I found a job
My goal was to find a job and work as a developer. I made a small project and began the search. I couldn’t find anything after 3 months and quit programming because of the university which I got into in 2019. I took a little break and started over during the summer of 2020. I wanted to understand which field of programming to choose.
Actually, iOS development interested me from the very beginning. The reason why I didn’t go for it then was the fact that I had a weak Macbook Air 2015. So, the equipment needed to be more productive to write a code. For a while, It took me away from immersion in iOS programming.
I switched over to Machine Learning and Data Science but eventually I didn't enjoy ML for some reason.
In the middle of October, I started iOS over again. This time, I was dedicated to it. I read a book on Swift and tried to code. This book got me so excited, so I finished it in terms of one week. In February, I found my first job! Don’t think that it was easy! I sent my portfolio to a fair number of companies and got rejected over and over again. Then, two companies invited me for an interview and only one of them offered me a job. The huge disadvantage of that job was that I didn’t have a mentor. So, I got stuck.
Having been working there for 5 months, I decided to change job. Finally, I found a job at the Mobile Development Studio where I was working as an iOS developer. As a team, we were always sharing thoughts about tech and different approaches to problem-solving. By the way, there were no senior developers at the Studio. So, we educated ourselves by finding solutions and discussing them on our own.
Well, I quit that job and found another interesting opportunity to grow. I got hired at Yandex as a Mobile Developer. Now, I’m working here and I’m very happy about it. At the same time, I’m still studying something new. I watch online conferences and read many articles and books to enhance my knowledge even more.
Conclusion
Thank you so much for reading! I really appreciate your time. Hope this article helped you understand that mistakes happen all the time, but you shouldn’t stop believing in yourself! You got it!