I've been wanting to change careers for months and get into programming, but bootcamps cost a fortune. I've seen there are free platforms out there but I don't know which ones are reliable or if they actually teach well enough to get a job.
After 16 years looking at numbers in accounting I learned to distrust any magic promises, and programming's the same way. There are free platforms that genuinely work well, but you gotta be realistic: they're gonna require discipline on your own, they won't hold your hand like a paid bootcamp does. FreeCodeCamp is what I recommend without hesitation, it has structured courses for JavaScript, Python, React and tons of other stuff. Then there's Codecademy (which is partially free), Khan Academy and Udemy which sometimes has courses dirt cheap when there are promotions. The secret is picking one language and diving all in, not jumping around between ten. Most people I know who switched careers without spending a fortune started with Python or JavaScript and stuck with it for 3-4 serious months.
What matters for getting a job isn't where you learned but what you can show. That's where GitHub comes in, where you upload your projects so potential employers see what you built. Make a shopping cart, make a password generator, make a simple game, whatever. That's worth way more than a fancy bootcamp certificate. I personally prefer seeing real code than papers when I review candidates at the company. The other factor is networking: get into online communities, into programmer Discord servers, into local meetup groups if there are any. That's where you find out about opportunities, about what companies actually want, and people help you when you get stuck.
What you gotta understand is that without paying for expensive courses it'll probably take you longer, maybe 6-8 months instead of 3-4 from an intensive bootcamp. But it's totally doable, especially if you can put in 2-3 hours daily. I suggest you practice the way I do my morning runs: consistency over intensity. Better to study an hour every day than 8 hours one Saturday and then nothing. And always verify what you learned by doing exercises on your own, don't just blindly trust that because you watched a video you know it.
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