So you decided to dive headfirst into a career change and learn to code... Congratulations! It's scary just to commit to such a big life change, so you really have accomplished more than most already.

If you're like me, you decided to make this transition via bootcamp. I did this, in part, because I had no idea what to learn in the vast sea of tech terms. JavaScript, okay I've heard of that. Java, is that the same thing? What the heck is Kubernetes?! React, Angular, Python, .NET, TypeScript, SQL, NoSQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, GraphQL (why so many?!?), Ruby, Rails, Ruby on Rails... How is a newbie to decide?

I'll be honest with you, I guessed. I found a camp with good ratings that worked with my schedule and gave them most of my savings. I looked at Course Report and Switch Up, made some pro/con lists and BOOM I was off.

But there are some other good resources to help you decide which way you want to go. The Stack Overflow Developer Survey is a great resource for this. But it's vast, so I'm gonna highlight some key points I wish I would have seen.

Popular Technologies

What are people actually using? You can see here why a lot of bootcamps focus on JavaScript as a base language.

Wanted Technologies

Of course you want to learn the technologies that employers are looking for! Here you see Python hop to the top of the charts.

Top Paying Technologies

This is the US view (there is a global view also available in the study) of what these technologies pay. A lot of what you could learn in a bootcamp falls in the bottom half of this list, but 110k is still nothing to sniff at.

How Technologies are Connected

This chart is kind of a lot. But, I wish I would have seen it because I was very confused as to what was a language vs framework vs database. This chart breaks that down by color, and also shows the relationships. JavaScript is a language, and Angular is a framework based on that language. Whatever bootcamp you pick is likely going to include some basic HTML and CSS along with a main language, a few frameworks, and a database.

Time to Pick!

You've seen some data, read some reviews, and now it's time to make your decision. You may be afraid of choosing poorly, but the stakes aren't as high as you'd think. You are going to gain valuable skills no matter what you pick, learning the logic and flow of development. Seasoned developers are hired all the time for jobs in technologies they don't know yet because, surprise, technology changes all the time! So don't put too much pressure on yourself, this is just the first step in a long journey.