Restarting my web development career

I'm one month into a new job where for the first time, I am a web developer.

I have been interested in computers ever since I was a kid and we got our first computer with Windows that only ran DOS. I was fascinated how it worked and wanted to know everything about it. The summer that I turned 13, a friend and I both decided to learn HTML. CSS didn't even exist yet so all you had to do was click "View Source" on any website and copy the code into your own text file, then change it and see what happened (and more likely, what you broke).

When CSS first came out, I remember thinking this would change everything. Being able to move your style code into a separate file would make everything more organized and make creating websites with multiple pages much more efficient.

After graduating high school, I enrolled in my local community college as a Computer Science major. But I didn't want to be a programmer. I liked building websites but there wasn't a major for that yet. I tried to learn Java for 2 years but it never really stuck well enough for me to want to continue and graduate. At the time I figured that was the end of my journey and would not work with computers for a job.

So I bounced around at a few jobs and eventually went back and finished my degree in technical management. During that time I got a job in IT to support my growing family (a wife and child with another baby on the way). It was ok but not what I loved.

While at this job I found WordPress, and started blogging about the things I was learning in IT, mostly just for myself. But I enjoyed writing so that pulled me back into web development, because I wanted to tweak the theme I had installed. Eventually that led me to learning more about WordPress, and from there I got my start working on my company's websites.

After 9 years there (and 2 more kids), I went to another job and left web development behind. I had a freelance business doing websites on the side, but it was mostly just to help people I knew. After 4 years, I got an opportunity to come back to my old company and do web development again. I this as my first opportunity to jump into doing what I love, so I took it and have never looked back.

Right now I'm relearning some things, and mostly feeling overwhelmed by all the things I need to learn to catch up. I suppose I will always feel somewhat behind, as that is the nature of the pace of technology, but it's an exciting world that I'm happy to finally be a part of.

I'm trying to get better at JavaScript as that seems like the most useful language that so much of the modern web is built on. I'm also learning React through Gatsby right now, and having a lot of fun building some really cool things.

I can't wait to see where this journey takes me as I continue learning.