I Just Graduated from School, How Can I Get Experience of programming?


Above everything else, the best way to get experience writing code is to get a job writing code. For learning, you can’t beat writing code 8 hours per day and getting paid for it.
 But if you can’t find an entry level position right off the bat, while you’re looking you should be building projects on your own, or contributing to open source projects.

Building Projects on Your Own

 A key thing that sets programming apart from other engineering disciplines is the fact that people do it as a hobby. No one designs mechanical systems for fun. But thousands of people write code in their spare time purely for the challenge and the satisfaction they get from creating something.
 Building something on your own is not as scary as it sounds. With a little programming knowledge learned from the previous section, you could have a simple web application built in a matter of days. Every piece of experience you pick up from this time will be critical once you land a job as a developer.
 Getting a job with no professional programming experience is not nearly as hard as it sounds. Getting a job with absolutely no programming experience is.
While professional development experience is ideal, you have to start somewhere. If you apply for an entry level position and you’ve built at least one sample project that is live on the internet, you will stand head and shoulders above the competition. I can’t tell you how impressed I’ve been with recent graduate who showed the initiative to not only teach themselves a modern language, but spent the time to code a project and put it online.
“Hire” instantly came to mind.

 Open Source Projects

 From Wikipedia:

  • Open source software (OSS) began as a marketing campaign for free software. OSS can be defined as computer software for which the human-readable source code is made available under a copyright license (or arrangement such as the public domain) that meets the Open Source Definition. This permits users to use, change, and improve the software, and to redistribute it in modified or unmodified form. It is very often developed in a public, collaborative manner.

 This means that anyone, even a new programmer, can contribute code to an open source project. You may have heard of Linux, Apache, WordPress, PHP, and Java; all are open source software projects.
Go to http://sourceforge.net/ or http://www.codeplex.com/ and take a look around. It’s daunting at first, but there are tons of projects that could use your help. Pick a project that sounds interesting and read how you can get involved. You may need to apply for access, or you may be able to check changes in right away. Either way, adding “Open Source Contributor” to your resume will be a huge advantage.

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