004: My First Dev Job Used ColdFusion (or, Why I’m a Freelancer)

What you'll learn

  • Why it’s important to ask questions about the positions we apply for (as newbies)
  • How to make the most out of an undesirable career situation
  • That you can totally be job-ready at 3 months into learning to code
  • BONUS: A special deal for LVEC listeners: 50% off your first month of Treehouse

Tweetables

In this episode, Nicole opens up about her first web development position, in a story about why expectation (vs. reality) matters, and how our newbie coder experiences can affect our future career choices.

Have you ever expected a lot of a goal outcome, and when it finally happened—it just didn’t quite deliver?

That’s more or less how I felt with my first web development contract gig. It was a wonderful experience overall, but I found that I was largely disoriented in the world of unfamiliar technology. Why all the confusion? Well, my first job used Adobe ColdFusion.

If you’ve never heard of ColdFusion, there’s probably a good reason.

ColdFusion is a server-side scripting/markup language that was at its height of popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s. Students don’t really learn it in the front or back-end nowadays, as technologies like JavaScript have taken over and improved on a lot of its functionality.

Programming principles are all the same across the board. However, my greatest challenge was translating what I already knew into a new language that didn’t have quite as many easy-to-read resources as I’d hoped for.

Find out more about how I made the best of a not-quite-ideal situation, and came out on top!

LVEC Special Student Offer

Get 50% off your first month of Treehouse!

I’d love to hear from you and chat about your experiences during your first web development job!

You can reach out to me:

On Twitter as @lavie_encode

On the La Vie en Code Facebook page

Or, via my Contact page

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What you'll learn

  • Why it’s important to ask questions about the positions we apply for (as newbies)
  • How to make the most out of an undesirable career situation
  • That you can totally be job-ready at 3 months into learning to code
  • BONUS: A special deal for LVEC listeners: 50% off your first month of Treehouse

Tweetables

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