In 2015, I decided that I needed a change in my life. I had been doing unfulfilling work at a small company doing tech support where career growth was non existent. Or rather, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The world of information technology is so vast with a myriad of roles and fields of expertise. I felt stuck and had a case of decision paralysis. For years.
My background is in building and troubleshooting servers and workstations. Although, it is a different field from programming, many of the skills translate well into programming. I had previously tried to learn Python on my own to round out my sys admin experience. I built a little script that scraped hard drive S.M.A.R.T. info from hard drives. It was messy, and probably would have given a professional python programmer a migraine but it worked. It took weeks to program this script from nothing, but I was able to do it. It made me proud and humble at the same, because what I made was super amateur code that I worked hard at and what I did learn was only the tip of the iceberg.
A few months passed, and nothing else really changed. It felt great to program something, but at the time, it didn’t occur to me that it could be my profession.
I had thought I wanted to get into a system administrator type role or work in cyber security and obtained low level certifications to try and jumpstart myself, but it didn’t feel quite right. On the recommendation from my brother, I took a career/personality test. The ones that ask you questions about yourself and spit out a few careers that might be up your alley. I took three different tests, and one of the careers that popped up in all three was programming. So, I asked myself why not take a shot? I tried it once and really enjoyed it. Why not dive in with everything?
I told my brother, who works in development and codes in PHP. He mentioned that the Flat Iron School had an online version of it’s course. I signed up for the Intro to Ruby track on their website and was immediately hooked. It was a lot to take in and at times overwhelming, but incredibly satisfying to craft something from so many different parts and have it all work. It challenges you to look at problems with a different lens. The journey to becoming a software developer has been replete with eureka moments and that is the reason why I program.