How to get started

So now I had my mind set on becoming a software engineer. But what am I going to do to prepare myself? How am I going to become competitive? Where do I start?

I googled for days. I read about other people's stories: where they started from, how they became competitive and the resources that are available online to help people like us. There were so many. In fact, I went from not knowing where to start because I didn't know anything to now not knowing where to start.

Here are ultimately where I ended up starting out from:

Leetcode easies: this is how I became acquainted with some of data structures and algorithms and what coding is like. I had to do a ton of googling again for just simple syntaxes. Sometimes it was about how to use numpy to do complex matrix calculations and sometimes it was how to do exponentiation in Python.

The Odin Project: I am not quite sure why I decided web development is what I wanted to do. I assume it is because there are so many good learning materials online for web development. The Odin Project is one of these great resources. It is an free, open source project for teaching web development and it includes the basics (HTML, CSS, JS) and MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, NodeJS). The curriculum also includes Ruby on Rails as well for those who are interested. Find out more at https://www.theodinproject.com/.

I also saw some other interesting things that I could have done:

CompTIA A+ certificate Harvard CS50 Tons of Udemy and Coursera courses

I would be very interested to find out about how other people started their career as a software engineer via other means so please let me know through my contacts!