My Coding Journey: Part 1

 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 (at least that's how I like to think of coding). I found creators like Chris Sean, Jarvis Johnson, and Andy Sterkowitz (plus a few others) who made me feel like programming is something I could actually do. I was inspired most by Chris Sean and decided to jump into what he did--web development.

The Tools

I ended up discovering The Odin Project which is an excellent example of Open Source done well on so many levels. However, The Odin Project ended up pushing me to freeCodeCamp and I had a hard time actually learning from their exercises. That pushed me to then picked up Colt Steele's Udemy Course. I jumped into that headfirst and when I came up for air to check in and see if coding was something I actually liked, the answer I found was a resounding "yes!".

The Goal

After deciding coding was for me, I decided to set a time-frame to get a developer job. I landed on January 2022. The job I am currently at (an administrative assistant at a financial planning office... don't ask, it's a long story) has a natural end come January 2022, so that was fairly straight forward. 

What's Next

So I've decided to become a programmer, I started with web dev, and my goal is to land a job in the tech industry in early 2022. Check out my next post to see my latest changes and adjustments on my developing developer journey.

Tim David


Comments

  1. Joseph J GraberJune 25, 2021 at 9:58 AM

    Thanks for sharing your journey here. I've had to learn more code than I wanted to, in order to take care of our websites, but I do not consider myself a coder. Will be interesting to watch your journey!

    ReplyDelete

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