I blew up my life

“I’m an imposter, a goddamn liar!”

At least, that’s what my internal monologue was screaming as I changed the title on my LinkedIn profile to “Front-End Developer”. You see, last month I basically blew up my life and walked away from my job of over 8 years and a career in advertising and marketing I had spent considerably longer building. I know, smart right?

It was absolutely fucking terrifying.

So why had I walked away from my career and sole source of income? Had I won the lottery? Received a surprise inheritance from a long-lost rich relative? Nope. I walked away because the first time I wrote “Hello World!” in my text editor, I was hooked. When I signed up for my first HTML & CSS workshop on a whim, little did I know I would fall down the rabbit hole into the world of web development. But one afternoon workshop lead to an 8-week part-time web development introductory course, which lead to 24-weeks of part-time HTML, CSS and JavaScript courses.

It was safe to say this was now more than a hobby for me.

I was excited to go to class even after working all day, I wanted to work on my projects all the time, I was thinking about my code when I should have been focusing on other things. This was a problem. Why? Because the more exited I got about web development the harder it became to ignore the fact that I was miserable in my job.

Truthfully, I couldn’t recall a time where I had been as passionate about work as I had become about coding. Over my career it had become common place to work in environments where most people were frustrated and burnt out on a daily basis. That’s some pretty depressing shit isn’t it? I’m not gonna lie. It was rough.

However, the more web development courses I took, the more alumni from HackerYou & Juno College I met. Most of them had no previous experience in coding, the only thing most of them had in common was the fact they had taken the Web Development Immersive Bootcamp. From there, they were able to launch a new career, forge a new path. The other weird thing? They were all pretty fucking happy. Ok, well maybe I was the only one who found that weird. They also all universally raved about their experience in the Bootcamp. Now, at this point I had started to suspect this may in fact be some sort of cult. How could so many people have the same positive experience without some sort of brainwashing going on? Despite that, it was the only cult I had ever been interested in joining.

The idea of building a career where I would continuously be learning, growing and challenging myself was now starting to feel more like a possibility than a pipe dream. I decided to take a chance and apply to the Bootcamp. I was accepted to Cohort 24 and am now a Juno College student.

There’s no turning back now. Bring on the Kool-Aid!