Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and today is a very special episode for two reasons. The first reason is today's sponsor is whiteboard. You've heard that before because that's where I actually work. Whiteboard is sponsoring Developer Tea today. The second reason today is such a special episode is because I'm going to introduce something that I'm going to refer to many times in the future. And it's called the developer career roadmap. The developer career roadmap. The developer career roadmap is intended to give you a step-by-step guide as a non-developer who is interested in becoming a developer and getting a job to the point where you can actually start your career and continue throughout the rest of your life working as a software developer. I've been working on this for quite a while now and I'm very excited to finally share some of the pieces and parts of the developer career roadmap with you starting today. And we aren't going to go through the entire roadmap today because we want to unveil each of these steps in future episodes and I want to share that stuff with you. But today I'm going to give you kind of the motivation behind why I decided to create the developer career roadmap. Now first I want to go ahead and make sure you understand that all of these episodes about this concept are going to be totally free to you in podcast format. If you are subscribed you will get each and every piece of this delivered to whatever podcasting app you use and it's totally free. You don't have to pay for any of it. As the Developer Tea audience continues to grow we will continue to reference back to the developer career roadmap. And we'll continue to add new information and expand on the same ideas that we're going to lay out in the developer career roadmap. Since I started this podcast I've been taking questions from people all around the world about being a world class developer and we created spec to help designers and developers level up in their careers. Most of the questions that I receive are related to the career path for a developer. How should I go about becoming a developer or should I go to school or instead of going to school should I pursue an internship. And we're going to talk about all of these things in the developer career roadmap. And what I want to do is I don't want to make it incredibly simple for you as a developer. Because the reality is this isn't a simple process. If you try to go it alone, if you've never been in this industry it's not simple to know exactly what steps you should take from knowing nothing about code at all to working in the industry and producing a product each and every day when you go to work. So my goal is to make it as simple as I can possibly make it for you, give you as much of a step by step guide as I possibly can while still maintaining a healthy respect for the complexity of this industry. And that's something that we're going to talk about a little bit later on in that episode today as well. The complexity of this subject. But first I want to talk about today's sponsor whiteboard. Since 2010 whiteboard has been working to leverage technology to accomplish great vision. Whiteboard designs the world that ought to be. Whiteboard's work can be found across multiple industries and it affects the daily business and the operations of startups and nonprofits and even large corporations all around the world. The expertise we have on our team ranges from designing and developing high impact digital platforms to navigating and implementing digital marketing and brand standards. Whiteboard is currently looking to bring on several new designers and developers. So you are an experienced interactive designer, a front end developer or if you have some experience developing with rails, we'd love to hear from you at work at whiteboard. Dot is you can also go to spec dot FM slash whiteboard for more information. Thank you again to whiteboard for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. And by the way, if you are listening to this episode a year down the road, don't hesitate to reach out to us. We are always looking to add the right people to our team. So it's not just a short season of hiring. We are always on the lookout for people who are passionate about the work that they do. People who are invested in learning people who believe that learning is a lifelong pursuit. So please don't hesitate to reach out. It's work at whiteboard. Dot is and again, spec dot FM slash whiteboard to learn more. Thank you so much again to whiteboard for sponsoring today's episode. So we're building this developer career road map. And I really think it's going to help a lot of you out with the decisions that you have to make. But I want to address something that I've already mentioned in today's episode. And that is the complexity of this industry. Every developer who works in this industry has a different story to tell. Every developer has different motivations for why they decided to become a developer. Most software developers are first generation developers. In other words, their parents didn't push them into this career. Some developers may have had a parent or a mentor that was into computers when they were younger. But for the most part, a lot of us got into this industry because we decided to go into the industry, not because it was handed to us by someone else. And a lot of developers, myself included truly love software development, the industry of software development. Whether you work at an agency or at a startup, you're creating a product maybe, whether you work as a freelancer, there's so many opportunities and such a low barrier to entry for most people. And for that reason, this industry in many ways embodies the idea of empowerment. It embodies the idea of acquiring skills and building your own future. And as a result of so many good things that this industry provides, I want to give back to the industry. But again, it's very complex because everybody's story is different. Everybody's situation is different. This developer career roadmap is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all discussion. Because the truth is, it is possible to go and build an application over the course of a weekend and that application goes viral or it gets acquired or something happens and you make a ton of money with very little investment that is possible. However, just like the lottery, it's very unlikely that that is going to be your career path. So what I'm aiming to do with the developer career roadmap is provide a dependable step-by-step guide that you can find your place in that guide and hopefully you can take those steps and advance your career and level up each and every day, making your career what you want it to be. Again, the power of this industry is that you build your future. Now, once you understand that going through the developer career roadmap is not something that you can do over the course of a couple of weeks or a couple of months, in fact, it is going to last probably far more than just a couple of years for you. What I do know about this industry is that you have the opportunity to create new and unique value in the world. If you want to learn to become a software developer, the world we live in is prime for you to do exactly that. And I'm hoping to give you the tools and the direction and hopefully the inspiration that you need to walk that path. That's why I'm creating the developer career roadmap. I hope you will subscribe so you won't miss out on the future episodes, the upcoming episodes where I will describe each step of the developer career roadmap. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Of course, today we're really announcing the next couple of episodes. You know, we're coming up on 300 episodes of Developer Tea and we're also approaching 5 million unique downloads. We aren't quite there, but we're just around the corner from that. I'm incredibly excited for the next season of Developer Tea. Hopefully, I can provide you the tools to truly level up in whatever stage of your career you're in. Thank you so much for listening to this show. Thank you again to Whiteboard for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. If you want to come work with me in Chattanooga, go and check out Whiteboard. You can email us directly at workatwhiteboard.is. That's workatwhiteboard.is. You can also go and check out spec.fm slash whiteboard for more information. Thank you so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.