Becoming a Software Developer: Some Interesting Tools that I Have Encountered.

When it comes to learning software development, the past 2 months have been epic for me. For the first time in my journey, I have had a great deal of structure in my learning. The most interesting thing that happened to me has been my encounter with Andela Homestudy platform, a platform that aspiring Andelans use in self-paced learning.

The Andela Homestudy platform is basically a collection of great learning resources. Anybody can access and use it at will to improve him/her-self in software development.

Today, I just want to share with you some of the interesting tools that I have encountered in the homestudy that changed how I learn. They are exercism.io, Mozilla Developer Network, Codecademy.com, w3schools.com, Stackoverflow.com Tutorials Point, jsbin.com, Freecodecamp.org and many others.

Exercism.io is a code practice and mentorship platform that is 100% free for all. The site has over 2,544 exercises across 47 programming languages (java, javascript, python, Ruby, C++, C#, etc. You also get to have one-on-one interaction/discussion with dedicated mentors. Typically, you access exercism exercises/challenges depending on the track of your choice, and then try to complete locally, after which you have to submit back to the platform for review by a mentor.

Mozilla Developer Network is a platform by Mozilla is an open community, where Developers create awesome tutorials and share documentations on most of the great software (web) development technologies in the IT world right now. The resources there are usually deep and rich, which makes it awesome to use.

Codecademy.com is one of the best code tutorial sites I have come across. Although they offer a freemium kind of service, the free edition is basically enough to get you on track in learning the programming language of your choice. The site provides a sandbox for you to practice your codes and become better at it. The content is very structured and organised, systematically incrementing the complexity to aid effective learning. I was able to cover their Python curriculum in 1 week, it was really good.

w3schools.com prides itself as the largest web developer site in the world. I personally have an intimate connection with this site. This may mostly be because it is where I started my learning journey from. Another reason is definitely the fact that their contents are very organised and usable. They also provide a tryit editor for testing out codes on the site. I don’t know how useful you will find w3schools.com, I can only say that there has never been a time that I set out to write codes, that one of the tabs on my browser is not w3schools (I have needed the site so much that I had to get the offline version, in case internet connection fails me.)

These are just the few that I can talk about right now, if you have the ones you use that I might not have encountered, feel free to share it in the comment section, I will really appreciate that.

Thanks for your time!