The Developing Developer

 The Pivot Sometimes you have your head down for a long time and you really need to come up for air. That's what I realized in April. I was on this fairly straightforward path of becoming a web developer (see the previous post) but I had committed to this path before I understood programming enough to consider a variety of options. I decided to take a short break and come up for air, smell the roses, and talk to people. I started talking to friends and friends-of-friends who are currently working in tech. I asked them how they got into tech and if they had any advice for a self-taught programmer. This was very helpful at this stage since I had been programming for a few months now and could actually understand a lot of the jargon my friends ended up throwing around. And this gave me some perspective. The Perspective Being able to talk to friends in the tech industry was super helpful and I also returned to YouTube for a few hours (not all at once). I had come to this realization wh

 The Decision Any good story has an interesting beginning, and I like to think my story does. I had just graduated from Colorado State University with my B.S. in Psychology. I applied for jobs left, right, and center (I'm looking at you Indeed). I ended up getting a few offers, but nothing I actually wanted to do--either the pay was to low or I could clean carpets, so no thanks. I decided I was done with school and I wanted to find something that would pay well and also be interesting to do. I ended up landing on learning to code as I considered my various options. I have been a little bit of a tech hobbyist--trying different Linux distros, following the latest devices in tech, that kind of thing. So I decided to give it a low-stakes investigation. After all, if I hated it, I could just dip and then figure something else out instead. The Path I ended up watching a lot of YouTube videos to figure out how the hecking hey to teach yourself how to tell dumb computers to do smart things