Start by doing

When I started coding I wanted to showcase my work as fast as possible, get attention and land a job. That's what I wanted. I didn't have 10k twitter followers (i still dont) nor did I have any real social media attention, but I wanted people to see what I can do.

So I started posting on Codepen - this was my first pen.

See the Pen Colorful Raphaël by Jonas Badalic (@JonasB) on CodePen.

It went by completely unnoticed! A day's work... did I completely waste my time? I realised I will need to build something nobody ever built before, something amazing, a nice button, a cool animation or some random canvas dots moving around the screen so that it would hopefully make it to the picked or popular section of Codepen where everyone would see it. Unfortunately, I lacked the ideas, designs and experience.

So where do you find ideas and designs? Well, obviously designers have ideas and since not all of them... Oh, let's just not go that way. The point is that designers are amazing, they keep pushing developers and come up with great ideas, sometimes those ideas never get coded and they just end up on Dribbble.

Dribbble is perfect if you want to push yourself to the limits as some of the shots there are really hard, others might be impossible, but that's ok. This will get you out of the comfort zone, force you to think differently about the problem, research and rewrite several times while always finding something you might not have accounted for. I really encourage you to try and look at some of the animated gifs posted there, pick one you like, head to Codepen.io and code it.

You will be learning by doing and in the end no matter if you fail or succeed to recreate the shot, you win!

With each pen you learn something new and then you get to share that with others. It's an amazing feeling, trust me. The community will appreciate it, give you nice comments, some might offer you a job.

That's how I got a job in Paris, and I'm sure you would too.