Is This Easy Mode? Breaking into Tech in 400 Hours, with Writer-Turned-Developer Jen-Li Lim

🎙 About the episode

Meet Jen-Li Lim 🇲🇾! Jen is a writer-turned-developer who has recently landed her first developer job! Although she had been tech-adjacent in the past (before becoming a full-stack developer, she worked in content marketing) and had always been interested in coding, it wasn't until the lockdowns that Jen started learning to code. She was doing it alongside a full-time job and quickly realized that she shouldn't compare herself to other learners since everybody has different circumstances. 

Jen started learning to code as a hobby. But after a couple of years and only about 400 hours of studying later, Jen realized - hey, this could also be an exciting career! She now works at a company offering free, lightweight vector animations for your website and tools to create, edit, and embed them. In this episode, you'll learn about Jen's struggles with coding and how she overcame them. She'll share invaluable insights on selecting portfolio projects, navigating roadmaps, and why learning to code is akin to learning to swim. Get ready to be inspired!

🔗 Connect with Jen-Li

• 👩‍💼 LinkedIn
• 🌐 Website

⏰ Timestamps

• How Jen got interested in tech back in the days of Neopets but never pursued it (01:40)
• Do you need to be good at math to become a developer (02:29)
• How Jen became a writer and worked in content marketing (03:32)
• Are there any similarities between content marketing and code? (04:21)
• What was it about coding that drew Jen in? (05:57)
• The hard part of learning web development is that there's no single path, and that's why Jen ultimately learned on Scrimba (07:55)
• How Jen structured her studying (08:50)
• Community break with Jan The Producer (10:42)
• How Jen logged her studying time and learned to code in only 400 hours! (12:48)
• Why you should learn to code at your own pace (13:39)
• How to get project ideas (15:32)
• Did Jen plan to switch careers? (18:18)
• Changing careers challenges your identity (19:38)
• Jen changed careers by means of an internal transfer. How's that different from applying for a job from the outside? (21:01)
• How Jen felt about the competition, and what was her advantage (22:23)
• Shortcuts vs. strategies (23:09)
• What is LottieFiles? (24:15)
• How Jen found out she was getting her first dev job (25:52)
• What Jen wishes she knew when she was starting to learn to code (26:51)  

🧰 Resources Mentioned

• Frontend Developer Career Path
• Podcast: From Classroom to Code: How Teacher-Turned-Developer Jess Secured a Tech Job Prior to Diving into Software Development
• LottieFiles
• One More Page
• Steph Smith
• Roadmap.sh

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You can also Tweet Alex from Scrimba at @bookercodes and tell them what lessons you learned from the episode so that he can thank you personally for tuning in 🙏 Or tell Jan he's butchered your name here.