... Except from real world environments. But that's not easy to come by. Take a look at your favorite job board. Every one wants x years of xp. Of course they want that. Why would they take an amateur if a seasoned pro is the same price? Now now yes, its still possible to get a job as a freshie. Im not disputing that. What i am here to talk about it getting real world experience on a budget. Pick your favorite language. Starting your journey over from the beginning lets take a look on the steps you took to get to where you are now.You found a tutorial online, or possibly a book from your library. You follow the steps. You install your language onto your machine and get to work. Eventually you grow out of the beginner phase. Now you are looking to expand your horizons. This is done via learning complimentary languages, frameworks, or related fields. But lets hold up for a minute. Lets just say you know a language, possibly another complimentary aswell, but the primary logic of your choice is where your real passion is. If you make it this far, Good Job! I feel that people dont get enough compliments but are rather told great, move on to the next step. Take a breath... then move on to the next step. When you are working for yourself or a business, there is more to programming then just coding all day. What i see people have issues with is getting past this. They are great programmers, but they dont know how to do anything with what they built. Do you know how many people build really impressive apps but never make a production version of it? How much effort someone puts into a project, that never leaves their machine? When talking to people who now have jobs one thing they all agree on is that moving from learning at home to working at a job is a bit of a shock. Sometimes your job will make it easier for you. You just push your changes then someone else takes care of everything else. You cant expect that. What i want to encourage people to do is to pick up a cheap computer and utilize it to get some real world experience. Let me talk about my journey. At a young age i liked computers. Actually there is no need to go back that far. So, i like ruby. And i like rails. And i like puma. Quick disclaimer. There are differences between web servers and app servers. Im not going to bother getting in to it here. For those that dont know puma is one of the app servers for testing on rails. Feel free to change the language/framework out with what you are familiar with but this is my story so nothing else matters. Fuck you. By this time i had created a handful of apps. Even some games with a engine that i got for free from itch.io during a promo. [DRGT](https://dragonruby.itch.io/dragonruby-gtk) I would have considered my self experienced at that time. I wasnt the best and i still aren't but i knew what i was doing. Yet if you dropped me into a work environment i would be more of a hindrance to everyone. For reference i was about 14-15 at this time. Ive never been rich, nor has my family. And thats ok. I dont need to be rich with how free (as in freedom <3 & price) the internet was. At the time i had a 2004 dell 360. It was crap. But debian made it more bearable. To escape the grasps of puma i decided that i needed to get a web server to actually put stuff into production and see the real world performance, aswell as show my friends. The real world experience was just a plus as i wasnt really concerned about it at the time. Programming was a hobby not a job at the time. So i search web server. FFS. Keep in mind i dont know anything at this time. Imma spare you the research but a week goes by and i come to grasp everything a bit better. I dont need to sell any organs. I just need a piece of crap that runs. I didnt have a job. Most of my money was spent recently on new puma cleats for soccer(me'z in the murica). White with a blue stripe. Had glitter in the blue that made it sparkle. With Christmas money i was able to shell out -everything. Great cleats BTW. Still got them. Well now in the summer and off from school i got less then $20 to my name. Dilapidated Chromebook enters the chat* [specs](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/vUUAAOSwMEZlUo6f/s-l1600.jpg) No no dont get excited. Its even worse. [mb](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/1uMAAOSwAk1lQ~QD/s-l1600.jpg) Thats more like it! This was a mass produced pice of crap for schools to give to the younger students who wernt the best stewards of school supplies. And this was bottom of the barrel. What is the story behind this exposed MB you ask. Simple. A kid dropped it, broke the screen. The Dad though he could swap the screen but didnt know what he was doing and broke everything more. For a amazing* $8 he gave the the mb which at this time had hairline fractures through out it. Kinda wild he even bothered selling it but it was going to the bin so im sure he thought it would be better to at least see what scrap he could get it for on Craigslist. I threw it into my bag and cycled home. Turns out chromebooks are a bitch. You cant just plug in an installation media. That don't work. To make it as painful as possible you cant select which drive to boot from by default. Fourtinatly i was able to find a resource that would walk me through everything. The original guide is gone but the equivalent still exist. [https://dbtechreviews.com/2018/09/13/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-chromebook-and-remove-chromeos/](https://dbtechreviews.com/2018/09/13/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-chromebook-and-remove-chromeos/) Not as simple as a normal pc but hey, it works. Now 5-6 years ago was still well past the prime time of i386 processors yet support still existed. CentOS supported 32 still and i was able to get that up and running no problem. RIP centos Now i was on to getting some real world experience! HA no. This wasnt puma. It was sql. rails 4 or 5 or whatever i was using back then actually used sqlite so i was somewhat familiar with the syntax. What i wasn't familiar with to was not being in localhost:3000 or :4567. From there it was Ngnix or one of the other alternatives at the time. What a pain! My first project. Buy a super cheap domain fbrauibgr4uit4t4zz.io or one of those. You know the ones im talking about. the $2 for 2 years domain. yeaaa that one. pointed it to my home network in modestly air-gapped system. ethernet dongle to switch that nothing else talks to and i though it was fine (please put more effort in then me). My first project: School tests. You see, teachers are lazy. They all use curriculum's that have existed forever. Math dont really change ya know. BTW i am a teacher myself now, i dont mean to insult anyone. Your hands are tied when it comes to what resources you can teach. But anyways. Teachers just scan a page out of their handbook and make a hundred copies to give to everyone. Very quickly my site became semi-famous in the school. It still baffles me to this day how well behaved the users were. The was no sign up, no moderation. Just a submit pics forum with a title and a drop down that would let you select teachers name. You would submit your work once you finished it and search by teacher or by recent. This also worked for screenshots that users sent in from online test. Completely anonymous and tailored for my school everyone got to cheat. Every-once in a while the site would be blocked and id buy a new cheepo domain. Im going to step back as my story is over and you need to make it personal to you. We all have different frameworks we are using and different needs. Needs that you will have to satisfy in a real world work environment. I want to encourage you to take the shock and the hassle of learning everything NOW, before you get a job. Everyone will understand that you are new and will give you a break but you wont feel good about it. Its a type of pill you have to swallow eventually. **If you want real world experience, you need to be in a real world environment.** Go out, buy a piece of crap. Go through all the specific headaches related to your application of choice. You will never have real world experience without a real world environment.