Landing a junior dev role without a CS degree and no experience

I recently made the jump from a non-technical role into a developer role. I don’t have a Computer Science degree and I’d never worked in a coding job before.

There are three it’s the key things that made the difference in landing a job. These are the things that worked for me, but aren’t necessarily going to be useful for everyone!

#1 Choosing to commit

For quite a while I’ve considered myself to be “techy”. I’ve always known my front end from my back end and my java from my JavaScript.

Throughout the years I’ve dabbled in different tech:

• I built my first portfolio website in 2009 for my CAD design work
• I wrote genetic algorithms for my Mechanical Engineering degree using Fortran (A language as old as the hills I know) in 2012
• I built an MVP iOS Swift app for a startup I was working on in 2015

The common thread has been that at each point I learned just enough to do something basic, moving on quickly and forgetting everything.

I never committed to change my career.

Partly because I only needed to learn a small amount of code for each project.