Proving your Coding skills without a degree in it

Put your portfolio on github. It's standard practice for those who didn't go the college route.

are they fun? it seems to me like a huge waste of my time to attend these events. maybe when i was a kid i would have loved it.

Britfag here, I work as a software engineer and have attended 5 different hackathons over europe (my employer sponsors me). Great experience every time unless they limit you to a small set of technologies. It's not all about the programming either, you get a chance to meet and work with people from loads of different places and you can learn a hell of a lot. It also helps to bolster your GitHub and LinkedIn accounts with contacts, event reports and code evidence.

Make projects / take shitty freelance jobs you can lie your way into getting, build a portfolio.

well i recently started going to tech meetups. and they mentioned these hackathons but seemed like too much work for nothing. my company doesn't even sponsor this activity. i have to do it in my free time.

Upwork has free tests, but you can scam answers. But Github projects are more important than piece of paper.

Source: Software Dev

OP, don't listen to people telling you to go to X Y Z

Do this Have it under your real name (obviously). Make it as tidy and as commented as possible. Also, make it related to math

What are some github repos one should make?
or commit to

Why would you ask here?

I'm not going to link. This is all free.
Start with Udacity CS101 to get a start doing coding puzzles and learning syntax. You only need to do the first couple of units, this is in Python. You could have this done in 2 days if you wanted.

Then start reading Eloquent Javascript. Get to chapter 3 or so, then start doing challenges on Codewars. Learn, live, love codewars for the next few weeks. Google is the best tool to go along with this. Read the next couple of chapters in Eloquent Javascript, then do this reactivex.io/learnrx/ up to problem 16. Then egghead.io/lessons/javascript-introducing-reduce-transforming-arrays-functionally - reference this to make sure you remember it.
Then do codewars challenges with this new skill.

Then do Intro To HTML and CSS on Udacity + Responsive Web Design Fundamentals on Udacity.

The do Javascript Basics on Udacity while continuing on with Eloquent Javascript.

Then build something.
If you find yourself not doing any of this, just do the first thing I recommended. It's self contained.

>Responsive Web Design
this is the newest meme, i told me colleagues i want the website responsive maybe they figure out what the fuck it means. meanwhile i'm coding the model and engine.

this guy just fucking made all this shit up, you just chose arbitrary shit wtf

Nobody gives a shit about your github. Do projects and put them on your resume as talking points.
Yeah put them on github too, also fork some random repos. Nobody will even look at it and certainly nobody will look at the commit log.

What projects should I make?
How complex do they need to be?

>Do projects and put them on your resume as talking points

So just describe programs you have written within your resume?

I talked to a guy in the same interview session as me.
He said he spent 3 years learning machine learning on his own using online resources like Udacity and Coursera.
I have no doubt that he was hired.

Unlike Software Engineering, Data Science applicants prove their skills and knowledge at the interview, since it's very mathy.

I'm not sure what his resume looked like. What I do know is that he already had a degree in (general) engineering before going full autodidact.

Also making sure everyone knows.
This path is called Web Development. It takes a only few months to learn.
Problem is, it also takes some street shitter from India three months to learn.
So if you want your career volatility to be the same as an Indian street shitter, be on your merry way and become a Web Developer.

You would be cutting the skin of your teeth to call it anything but unskilled labor.

There is real value in Computer Science coursework. No you do not have to get a degree. But you should do the coursework.

Don't talk about things you don't know about. This is best post in this shitty thread, wasted on the idiot OP.

I recommended it because it includes some great information on flex. Manipulating the grid of a webpage.

What would you recommend he learn then? Post a guide like I did, because I'm genuinely interested. Though I get the feeling you have no idea what you're talking about.

I live in the bay area and I want to go to Hack Reactor (coding bootcamp) where I'll spend 3 months, 72 hours a week learning this stuff non stop with a cohort doing the same. This teaches you 'full stack web development' to get you ready for a 'junior software developer' position.

Coding boot camps get a lot of flack because apparently 3 months (72 hours /week) isn't nearly long enough to learn this stuff.

>full stack web development

alright i was in the same shoes once upon a time.
what i did and not sure if it's the best but worked for me:
i was coding since 12 yo
i love programming but didn't finish uni it was uninteresting and the programming there was very rudimentary (things i learned as a child) and the economics and management was pretty hard also little interest to me. math and physics even tho i like these subjects was devastatingly hard, the pace of it was the worst. i have my issues with concentration most likely adhd but whatever that boat sailed a long time ago.

so there i was with no degree and pretty good programming skills trying to find a job.

obviously i couldn't knock at the doors of morgan stanley that i'm an excellent coder hire me!

i did freelancing to support myself and did single projects on contracts. there was a firm where they were in a pinch i helped them out by writing a software a project years late and twice failed was successful because of the software i thrown together in 3 weeks. it was a machine that could pick containers up and put them down on a railway and used the navigaton lasers raw sensor data to recognize everything around it. this was the piece i wrote, the margin of error was a few mm and not the train nor the sensor was mm accurate by a long shot. yet i did it.

after that this firm hired me as a junior dev. they had different kinds of work than what i liked they also developed big software systems for production and warehouse management.

i worked my way up to senior dev and now pretty much doing software architect work. designing a totally new system from the ground up.

if i leave this firm i will have something to put in my resume. tons of projects under my belt, and years of real life experience makes degrees pretty moot.

but i did not mean to brag the point is if you are not the cream of employees don't try to start at the cream of firms. you start small and grow.