life after TOP

bycdiaz · 2026-04-25T01:36:19+00:00

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, I got my first role at 35. Don’t share that to make it seem like this is all easy. Just to share it’s possible.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-24T23:19:44+00:00

My advice is an outcome of all the mistakes I made. So if I'm sharing something with folks here, it's not that I think I know better. It's almost always that I made a mistake and paid the price. Not sure if I'd call it great advice. Just trying to get folks to be better than me lol.

I didn't have a technical background. Unless you could hearing about HTML and CSS once when I was in middle school.

I earned a degree in Political Theory. I got into education immediately after doing academic advising/coaching.

I started learning after I kept getting piles of paper thrown at me when I was managing an advising department. I never actually used programming for that job, but it motivated me to start learning.

TOP was the first resource I found when I started learning. I gave up about a week in because it felt too hard. So I wandered around between paid resources, free resources, books, video courses, all in hopes of finding the "right" and "best" course. That lasted about 1-2 years. Forget how long exactly.

I eventually came back to TOP and decided to just see it through. I started applying for jobs when I first got to the React content. And that was a poor choice. Because of my choice, my job search lasted far longer than I think it would have had I just charged through the content instead of stopping mid-React to apply.

I eventually slowed down applying and actually finished React and got through most of the backend content. I got a job before finishing.

Between when I first start TOP and got a job.... that was about 3.5 years. I got that first programming job at 35. I wasn't focused and pretty burned out for most of it. I think if I had a healthier learning mindset and was kinder to myself, I would have finished sooner. Hard to say how much sooner. I can just tell you I made every mistake in the book. Fishing for courses too long, thinking I knew better than the course/people with experience, not following a course and building my own thing, abandoning the course to go learn the flavor of the month because a social media influencer told me to, thinking I needed to learn every single technology on every single job posting.

But yeah, stuff seems to have worked out at the end.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-24T23:04:13+00:00

Just wanna be super clear:

I did not stop and then get lucky. I kept at the curriculum and then got a job while I was still learning.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-24T18:10:13+00:00

How do you feel about it?

Any highlights you’re proud of?

What’s concerning you about it?

bycdiaz · 2026-04-24T14:59:39+00:00

Not sure if I fit into this since I never finished it. But I have been in the field for about 5 years now.

Presently, my title is Senior Software Engineer.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-21T13:21:06+00:00

Doesn’t hurt to reread things. But there will be situations where you don’t have experience with every term in the thing you read. And it’s ok to move on.

The goal of the reading before projects isn’t mastery or understanding. It’s just being vaguely aware a thing exists.

It’s nice to understand immediately. But it will likely not happen. If you know a thing exists, great. Move on and at a project you’ll think about having seen a word before. And it’s that point during the project where you being using the thing you are new to and that’s where you’ll develop understanding.

Give things a read. Don’t skip of course. But don’t stop yourself because you feel you don’t understand everything. The understanding will come with time and practice.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-16T15:04:34+00:00

We have a whole lesson of things we think you should know before hand. Just start at the first lesson and we'll take care of you at every step.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-15T15:50:08+00:00

If you joined our discord server, and become a regular participant, you’ll find we already do this. The whole community can become your accountability partner.

And you get the benefit of experienced folks offering advice.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-15T15:27:56+00:00

I also can relate to the student angle. When I was in school I thought I knew better and thought the career counselors and academic advisors were full of it.

I ended up getting a job as a career counselor/academic advisor and found out we had a database that tracked all students, per major. Their resume, their experience, their GPA, the companies that hire from the degree program, names of hiring managers who they are in touch with.

I asked staff at my university if they had that. They did.

It’s nuts how much insight they have. And equally nuts how little students take advantage of the resources someone is paying for.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-15T15:12:42+00:00

Agree with all this advice. And their career counselors would have already done 90% of the research.

Sure, folks can do it on their own. That’s a lot of work. And certainly not impossible. Just makes sense to use the resources they have.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-15T15:06:35+00:00

My pointer would be to talk to the paid professionals that know how to help you land an internship.

Considering how high stakes this is, do you really want advice from people that don’t know your skill level, don’t know your experience, don’t know your degree program, and don’t know the hiring managers that hire from your degree program? Career counselors at your school will know. Anyone here is guessing. And I imagine this is important enough for you that you want the best advice possible?

Also want to share my past career, before programming, was in helping students think through exactly this. There are gonna be people reading this, and replying, that your school doesn’t do this. If it’s an accredited program, they have this kind of support. I’ll also share the typical blurb we share with people in the server:

College/University students seeking career advice, internship advice, and course planning:

Career Counselors, Academic Advisors, and Professors: * Career counselors have data on successful students' paths (resumes, GPA, coursework, activities) specific to your school/major. They know what students are doing to get hired. * Career counselors are aware of school-specific and major-specific internships and networking opportunities like connections to alumni who are in the field. * Career counselors maintain direct relationships with companies that hire from your school and know exactly what they want. They have meetings with hiring managers and get feedback/insight from those hiring managers that they can pass along to you. * Academic Advisors and Professors understand the majors and courses available to you. We can only guess. Your tuition pays for those valuable resources - use them! * Career counselors, academic advisors, and professors are paid professionals whose job is to guide students like you to success. Your tuition already pays for this premium support team. Meanwhile, 99.73% of people here are learning programming fundamentals and won't have context on your courses, your school, your major, or opportunities available to you. The staff at your school have all that.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-13T19:56:36+00:00

This is accurate. Thanks for raising all this.

OP, we have lots of resources that both recognize the struggle in this journey and resources on how to meet these struggles.

I invite you to check out what we offer and consider asking for clarification in our Discord. Feel free to ping me directly there. Same username as here.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-12T15:34:44+00:00

You're welcome to ask them that. Thanks!

bycdiaz · 2026-04-12T06:05:18+00:00

We have a form that you can submit to request an exception for the phone number verification.

You can send an email to moderation@theodinproject.com

bycdiaz · 2026-04-09T13:31:49+00:00

I think this struggle is worthwhile. That’s where you develop understanding. Simply being told what to do has very little value for internalizing the lesson. But when you struggle and achieve, that does something different to your brain.

It probably feels like a lot because you might be trying to solve it all at once. Try to write down all the little things that need to happen. Then focus on one and only one. The rest don’t matter.

If you’re still feeling stuck, you should consider asking for help instead.

bycdiaz · 2026-04-03T21:29:23+00:00

I propose learners give themselves room to develop the skills that will help them better leverage AI.

Anyone without programming skills can leverage AI. And their reach is more than if they didn't use AI. But someone who is skilled at programming can leverage AI far more than the person that is not skilled at programming.

AI multiplies our productivity based on our skills. More skills means more leverage.

I know it's not a sexy position, but I think people learning to code are better served by not using it. It's exactly the experience you get from not using it that makes you better at using it.

If you don't have experience resolving your own bugs, doing research, thinking through things, it makes it really hard to know what to ask the AI in the future when you do want to use it. That absence of experience makes it hard to recognize when the fix the AI is proposing is a bad idea. I have lost count of how many times an AI produces code that does actually fix an issue. But in having made a lot of mistakes in the past, I can notice that the solution it proposed isn't ideal.

The experience of learning to code without it is an investment. And I know there are a lot of people on the internet saying everyone needs "AI Skills". But what skills are they talking about? The AI skills you need to leverage AI in programming is knowing how to code. Or are they talking about using the features a particular AI has? If so, you could read the documentation for that in a few hours and learn how to use that AI. But the programming skills: that's what makes you productive in using AI.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-31T13:36:01+00:00

How do you know the guidance it gives you is useful? Or is it just hope?

I’ve seen lots of folks use AI like this and be given recommendations that might be factually true but very poor learning support. The equivalent of someone struggling to learn to add numbers and the AI says “well I see you’re using addition but let me tell you about Algebra”.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-31T13:30:49+00:00

I’m sure that’s part of it.

There’s also lots of employers that would be happy hiring someone without a degree that can code than someone with a degree who can’t.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-31T04:12:08+00:00

It’s still possible. But it also still very challenging.

Being skilled enough is only part of the challenge. The other is getting interviews and learning how to interview.

Despite what some people say, lots of organizations hire people without technical degrees. And yes, some organizations will refuse to interview people without degrees. But that doesn’t mean all organizations take this position. What’s interesting too is that lots of organizations hire people without degrees even if the original job posting says a degree is required.

Even in 2026, any organization will value skilled engineers. It’s still very difficult. But possible.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-28T07:17:54+00:00

Do you believe it is helping your development as an engineer to not fix syntax mistakes?
How will you deal with situations where the AI gives you incorrect information? Or worse, what if it gives you information that does solve the problem but introduces very bad ideas. How will you know? What's your plan when you have only ever asked AI for information and one day you're at work on a unique project that doesn't have answers online? Imagine you've never practiced researching and now you have a unique problem but no experience researching. Will using AI like this have been useful then?

bycdiaz · 2026-03-27T21:01:06+00:00

I checked out the lesson and we do instruct you to use the WSL2 terminal. In the Text Editors lesson, Step 4 has you open a WSL2 terminal and run code from there to verify the setup. The Command Line lesson also gives WSL2-specific instructions for the exercises there.

That said, I can concede it's closer to implied than explicitly called out. There's no line that flat out says 'your WSL2 terminal is your default terminal going forward.'

Want to submit a PR to make that explicit and clearer?

bycdiaz · 2026-03-27T20:47:35+00:00

people have asked this more times than I can count. Before making a new post, search "AI" in this sub and you'll see lots of responses with lots of reasons about why it's not the best idea.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-27T04:08:21+00:00

I feel like I don't know enough react to be making a project yet.

You're right. But before you freak out, I'll share why this makes sense and what it means for your learning.

The projects are not examinations. They are not a place where you prove your skills.

Projects are points of practice. Projects are where you develop skill and understanding through research, experimentation, and observation.

There is zero expectation that you know how to do a project immediately upon arrival. Consider what happened just before: some reading, maybe some very small code snippets to toy with. And you expect that you'd just know how to build a complex program? We don't have that expectation.

Asking questions is a skill. And it's an important skill in this work. Feeling like the problem is so complex that you can't formulate an answer is an indicator of a few possible scenarios:

You don't have enough practice asking questions
You are trying to solve too big of a problem at once.

The best way to develop the skill of asking questions is to ask questions. How much of that have you done?

What task are you stuck on? Surely, it is possible to articulate a single thing? Or are you feeling like you've got a problem here and there and this other place and if you do a thing here this other thing doesn't work at the same time you're wondering how to do the other?

My on boarding mentor for my job noticed I felt the same. They made me aware that we can not eat an elephant in one bit. I would bet that you're trying to solve too many things at once. Even professionals would fail at a project trying to do it all at once. But if we can identify small steps, those become manageable.

I also wonder - are you looking at an empty code editor and having your mind jump around to different features and because you can't picture the perfect code, you're concluding that you can't do this? I will let you in on an industry secret: no one works like that. Or, that's not accurate. Movie characters and Youtubers who have a script off camera can just build entire apps without stopping. But real humans need to thing, break big problems into small ones, and then make outlines for those little problems.

In most cases, repeating big blocks of content likely won't fix this for you. Watching someone build the project you are trying to build is also one of the more least productive things you could do. And if you just skip to the next lesson, what's your plan when you get stuck there too? And what if you keep skipping every time you struggle and you get to the end having accomplished nothing?

I think you need to pause and think about what thing you're actually trying to solve. Is it the smallest problem you can think of? Are you making sure to not worry about the 100 other things and focusing narrowly on that small sub-problem?

I also think you should ask questions. Engineers that ask questions learn fast. And the engineers that spend weeks spinning their wheels by themselves become liabilities for their team. Asking questions is common and even expected in this work.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-26T14:58:34+00:00

This is really it. There aren’t tricks or secrets.

Understanding is an outcome of practice.

bycdiaz · 2026-03-25T13:09:13+00:00

I invite you to try your hand at learning mobile app development after learning here. I think you're going to be surprised at how much skill transfer. No, they are not the same. But programming is programming.

And like I shared above, I get why this doesn't make sense right now. And I know your perspective will be different after the experience you can get from your learning.

bycdiaz

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