If you’ve been in the learn-to-code space for any length of time, you have heard of Danny Thompson.

Danny has an inspiring story; he went from cooking fried chicken at a gas station to being a software developer (and briefly worked at Google!).

People are always asking him, “What coding language should I learn?”.

Danny’s answer is always to research your local job market.

If there are a lot of Java jobs in your area, learn Java. If there are a lot of web startups, maybe learning JavaScript and a framework or two like React or Angular would be a good choice.

How I picked a language

It was chosen for me.

Back in 2019, or pre-Covid, I started a coding academy, Lambda School.

They were careful not to call it a boot camp, but it was just 9-months long.

The track I chose was web development so the languages taught were HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React, and Python.

Getting that first developer job

So, I left Lambda School in March of 2020, the worst time in the world to be looking for a job. The entire world was shut down, and no one was hiring unless you were an “essential worker.”

I applied to over 700 jobs between November of 2019 and May of 2020.