➪ Last Minute Hacks

TBH, everything I’ve listed so far is pretty much a last minute hack. And by last minute, I mean a couple of weeks. I worked on all this stuff during my Christmas break, so I’d say everything I just listed in pretty do-able in 2-3 weeks.

If you’re like me and you have no prior coding experience, or little to none, it might help to pick up a few languages (I’d say aim for quality over quantity) over your break once the semester ends. Mind you, you should aim to have a project in these languages by the time you start applying to jobs, so don’t be too overly-ambitious. No one expects you to have the next social networking website up and running for your 1st co-op, but you should have something to show and talk about. You’re going to be asked to describe your projects during interviews, and you should have a clear sense of your end goal, and your progress so far.

If you have absolutely no clue where to start from, as a tried and tested suggestion, you could start off with HTML/CSS. They’re pretty straightforward to learn and your project could be creating your own website. Easiest trick in the book, and literally every CS student has designed their own website. You could add elements and functionality to it later (through JavaScript, bootstrap), but for the time being, stick to HTML and CSS, and you can create a reasonably good looking website. Link to your blog (if you have one), contact information and your resume, to name a few. It's the perfect way to showcase your progress, and you could always make improvements as you learn more front-end languages. You can find amazing online courses on front end development on Udacity, Coursera, Udemy etc. The reason I’d say HTML and CSS is a good point to start at is because a) they’re honestly quite easy. I’m not implying in any way that they don’t require any effort, but once you have a basic sense of how the major elements work, you can navigate around, no problem.

The one thing I would very strongly recommend is to have a very solid sense of what you want your website to look like, and not to get sidetracked. Learning about the different CSS styles can quite literally go on forever, so if you don’t want to be overwhelmed, have a clear sense of what you want your end product to look like.

Tip: YouTube will never fail you.
Stay on track. Its very easy to gravitate towards other projects, but you have to remind yourself that you’re on a deadline. You need to have something to showcase by crunch time.