One of my connections asked a great question in the stream this week.

This is the type of question that seems simple at first, but the more you think about it the more thought provoking it can be, so I did a [quick poll]

My first reaction was the third answer here. I guess that you get a Job Title when someone's willing to pay you for it.

What About?

But then I thought. What about Dustin Moskovitz? He and his more famous friend Mark Zuckerberg took a year off from Harvard and became Facebook's first CTO. When did he become a 'Junior Developer'? Does it really matter?

So I ended up thinking that it's more about when you launch your first live project. An idea you built yourself and are ready willing to publish to the world. That feels right to me.

My Experience

My first title was Web Designer. I switched careers from Graphic Design. Even then, it was more of a combination designer/developer. Years later I saw a job posting for a position like mine and honestly, I think that if I'd have seen the requirements for the job I already had, I would have never applied for it. Five years of this, degree in the topic, etc. Someone else posted a comment on my poll about it.

Start Building

So, my advice...get some experience by building things and apply for those jobs. You can definitely call yourself a developer if you get the job with that title, but otherwise, I would worry more about getting experience doing things so that I can show employers.

This happened to Eric Barone, the sole developer of one of my favorite games...Stardew Valley (current farm above). He graduated from the University of Washington with a Computer Science degree, but hadn't been able to get a job in the industry. So looking to improve his skills he developed the game which has sold 10 million copies so far. I'm sure at some point he earned the title, even before he started making money from the game.

Maturity without the Title

I'm a firm believer that you can show five years of maturity without having five years of experience. In the meantime, I gotta figure out how to work the greenhouse to see if I can afford a Galaxy Hammer.

Last Week

I just recorded a new version of Bootstrap 5 Essential Training. I'm a big fan of the framework because I tend to be more practical than most. Most of the time I'm not looking for an esoteric layout. I spend more time these days adding features to apps than nitpicking a layout.

This is going to sound weird, but I was surprised at how flexible the framework has grown to be. Yet, they still have time to add features I didn't know I needed, but that will help make my life better. For example there's a way to convert button groups to checkboxes. So you can create button groups that control radio or checkboxes. That's a small, but cool change and there are lots more.

I've got some new videos in the works, but I'm really leveling up my recording studio, which if you know me, it's already ridiculously complicated. See you next week.