Well, before i start telling you my story, i've gotta say it is one of a kind… Let me introduce myself first. I'm Cesar Pérez, and i'm a 20 years old Venezuelan Web Developer, Electronic Engineering Student and self named HotCakes 🥞Master.
Agus, the traversy 🎮
My journey as a developer started on April of 2020, a couple of weeks after the pandemic started i finished my ongoing semester as an Electronic Engineer and got into a Game Jam competition that was being organized by the students of one of the university clubs. I teamed up with a couple of friends to make a game in two weeks, all of us without any previous experience but willing to win, driven by the pure of excitement and experience, and a couple of bucks of reward. My teammates were in charge of the history concept development, character/level design and animations, while i was responsible for programming everything, from character movement, enemy behaviors, bosses machine states to health system, camera, an all of that stuff.
But I didn't knew the language neither how to use the game engine, so i had to learn C#, test the game and get used to Unity game Engine ASAP!. I decided to follow a huge reproduction list from Youtube that covered everything and after long everyday programming journeys and with the help an support of my team we managed to finish up the game just a couple of hours before the deadline. I'll never forget that last day; my eyes burned so much that i had to wear sunglasses in order to keep programming the game. We named it Agus, the traversy. And no, it wasn't my idea.
Did we won?, no, definitely no. We were so tired and excited because we finished that we were too lazy to test the game one last time, one pixel bugged kept the judge from finish up the game. So we got disqualified i guess.
Was i happy?, YES. Until then i hadn't been so excited and disciplined about something a long time ago, that's what got me hooked into programming, a buggy game. But, i decided that game development wasn't my thing, setting up the scenes, the sprites, animations and all that stuff were dependent of someone making the assets for me because i didn't have that skill.
The Mobile App 📱
After that journey i came with what i thought was the next 1 million dollar idea. A delivery app… What a non trivial and original idea, isn't it?. Got teamed up with two friends from the university and one of my cousin and we spent the next couple of months making this idea into a reality,i was in charge of the mobile app development, it was programmed on Scratch programming language on top of Kodular, a platform for making Android Apps, the web app was made on React by a friend of mine who had more experience on web development.
Six months later we realized that it wasn't that much of good idea and there were already a lot of well established delivery app's companies in the country with more people and resources involved, so i decided to take a break and rethink about my life.
The routine 💻
At that time i started to feel curiosity for web development, it was both the most viable and the only programming option for me at the moment because i neither had the system resources to build native mobile apps or the patience to get into complicated syntax and environment setups, plus, i knew a little about html, css and javascript from some courses i took a couple of years ago.
And there i was again, hooked into programming for more than 8 hours a day. I used a lot of free resources to learn: Youtube videos, Udemy courses, free bootcamps ( cough thanks freecodecamp cough), removed any distraction and got into this routine for approximately 2 months:
- 6AM: Watch 1 or 2 Youtube tutorials about javascript and take notes.
- 7AM: Breakfast.
- 8AM: Freecodecamp exercises.
- 9AM: Watch 1 or 2 youtube tutorials about javascript.
- 10:30AM: Practicing what i've learned.
- 11:30AM: Break, helping with Lunch and making chores at home
- 1PM-3:30PM: Watching videos/courses about technologies i was interested like SASS or Refreshing my knowledge about HTML and CSS.
- 3:30PM-5:00PM: Make a cake, exercise, or whatever i felt like doing.
- 7:00PM: Dinner.
- 8:00PM : Watching short videos about web development.
I've gotta say that it wasn't the most efficient one but it surprisingly worked, because in 30th of September of 2020 i got my first job offer!…
Suscribe for part II!
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