Switching to IT: Becoming a software developer with no background or previous experience — Part 3/3

Mário Cosme
5 min readJul 2, 2021

The focus of this article, the final part of the series, is to talk a bit more in-depth about the first couple of years after managing to get into IT Development. If you’re just starting, you’ve come to the correct place! If this isn’t the case, I would advise you to start reading the first or second part of the series which goes into more detail on what to do and to expect before reaching this career stage.

“I’ve never heard of this before!”

It can happen today, tomorrow, or any day of the week, however, it will most definitely happen. There will come a time where you will hear someone talking about X, perhaps read somewhere online about X or even go through a README.md file and see X!

Let’s unmask X, it’s the unknown and you should never be afraid of it when it comes to knowledge. You should do the exact opposite, accept it and act on it. I remember a lot of instances when this happened to me, some colleagues across the desk were talking among themselves about a new framework, a better architecture, some flashy software, and so on. You should always be curious and consider those five seconds of opening a new tab on the browser, searching and read through the first couple of results sacred.

Google, Duck Duck Go, Bing, Brave, whatever your choice is, use it! If the search engine you’re using is still not your best friend, you should change that…

--

--

Mário Cosme

🇵🇹 Senior iOS Developer @ Siemens Mobility — Coding by day, gaming by night.