How to build a career in Software Development?
Congratulations on taking the first and the most important step towards building a great career in Software Development, that is the curiosity to find out how to build a great career.
With this intent to work hard and build your career in software development, it is extremely important that you work hard in the right direction. The biggest problem faced by the majority of students is the lack of mentorship and lack of direction that leads to very small results of all their hard work. I have personally faced this during my undergraduate time at IIT Delhi and have seen lakhs of students feeling stressed due to the same.
As Coding Ninjas founder and as a teacher, I have seen thousands of students going through this journey and eventually succeeding in their quest. Over the years, there are few questions that keep bothering everyone. In this series of articles, I am going to try and answer as many of these questions as possible. Here is a quick flowchart of how one should prepare and work towards doing well in their tech journey.
In this article let’s talk about the first & the most important step towards building a strong career in Software Development — To build a strong grasp on Programming Foundation, Data Structures & Algorithms. These are the concepts which will train you in how to programme computers to solve problems efficiently & how to store data efficiently, that’s essential for choosing software development as a career.
Programming Foundation, Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA)
What are Data Structures & Algorithms?
While solving various problems and writing code for them, one thing we always have to think about is how do we store the data. We have multiple ways or structures to store data and the right choice is extremely important for us to write optimised code. These various structures are called Data Structures. Unless you know about these and unless you practice a lot of problems using them, you will not be able to think and implement optimised solutions for most of the problems.
The algorithm is just a fancy word for a solution to a problem. An algorithm is a set of instructions or steps that someone needs to follow in order to solve a problem. Data Structures are critical for you to think of optimised algorithms.
Why do I need to start from DSA? Why can’t I start building apps right away?
Like everything else in life, shortcuts don’t pay off in the long run. It’s extremely important that we build the right foundation before we jump into more advanced concepts/technologies. DSA would help build that foundation and it would ensure that we don’t struggle when we try to learn app/web development or even Machine Learning/ Data Science.
- It would teach you the fundamentals of solving problems in general — how to think about any problem and break it into parts and solve it.
- It forms 80% of the first filtering test & the interviews of many big product-based companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the likes. So, eventually for you to crack interviews, DSA is going to play a very important role. You can look at some interview experiences of people at top companies and you will realise the importance of DSA in interviews.
- In DSA, you are taught to write efficient code, think about the time and space complexity of your solution. Goes without saying, efficiency is very important in real-world applications and you need to learn to think about it on a default mode while coding. With a good handle on DSA, you will be writing optimised code and high-quality code, which is extremely important for any real-world application.
- While developing applications, if you do not know the fundamentals of DSA, you would mostly be copy-pasting code from here and there- google, StackOverflow etc. You would not be able to understand what and why behind what you are doing. On the other hand, if you are good at DSA, many things you would do ahead would become more or less commonsensical.
You can review interview experiences of firms like Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and more at CodeStudio.
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