I haven't been on this platform for a while and recently I was working on something with the Github API and saw the little Dev.to connection and thought I should slide on and write a little something. After I opened my profile I saw a little "4 year badge" and all my post from my early days of programming and after scrolling the feed for a minute I saw a lot of other people who where in that same early-stage place I was and I wanted to give you guys a little bit of my story with coding, where I am now, and why it's all worth it in the end.
So where am I now? Why should you read this? Well I'm in college for Computer science but I'm also a senior software engineer at a contracting company. I'm almost completely self taught and I'm not from a family of programmers (my parents can barely send an email). While I'm already really happy where I am right now my goal is to go to grad school and become some kind of research software engineer and hopefully work for some kind of big tech, university, or do my own thing.
Getting to this point is a hard journey and for people just starting out that last paragraph may sound daunting, I know it did to me over 4 years ago when I created my Github and shortly thereafter, this dev account. At that point I had some programming experience. I had played with scratch, I was on a robotics team (where I did java, albeit very basic java), and I was hungry for more. This brings me to a pivotal point in my programming journey and what I recommend everyone who wants to get in to software do...
Build a project
Everybody can probably think of something they'd like to see improved in the software world and I'd recommend you embrace it and build it. My first project was an AI assistant rip - it was hard and way above my skill level, but it built me up to the level needed to build the project needed to build a somewhat functional version of what I wanted. (and with AI tools now it's even easier to ask specific questions answered - I was just googling everything) That brings me to my next piece of advice
Ask (or Google) everything
I'm self taught, and you can teach yourself, but that doesn't mean learn in a vacuum. Any little question you have should be Googled or asked. That's how your going to learn not only to do what your doing, but to start to learn the dev world. When your working on hard projects I promise you will encounter thing you don't know and so many people will give up instead of diving in to it. When you hit those hard problems remember your a Google search away from Stack-overflow posts, Open Source projects, blog posts and documentation. Googling got me through my first couple years of development and it got me to the point where I don't need to look up everything and even get to contribute to the body of look-upable information. When you are googling and on blog posts there can be one major unhealthy side effect and that is lesson #3...
Tune out the noise
When your on the programing internet your going to here a lot of "this editor is for real programmers", "that technology is so bad", or "real developers use this OS". Tune that out. All that matters is what gets the job done. Be confident in the technologies your learning, I promise there is a market for them and the skills you learn from them can be easily transferred to other places, I've used just about every editor and they all do the same things in different ways - use whatever you like, I'm a Mac and Linux guy because I like the UNIX command line, but a Windows machine will get all your work done just about as well. Turn off the noise and focus as long as your actually coding your on the right track and your doing better then most of the people making noise. And that brings me to my last little tidbit...
Just keep coding
After a while I stopped working on my first project and you most likely will too. But keep working on your own projects, work on open source projects, get your work out there. The more you code the better you'll get and the more you code in public the attention you'll get from the community and from employers. Like anything practice makes perfect and you have a never ending list of new technologies to learn and ideas to try. That does sound a little daunting, but it's also fun incredibly fun.
In conclusion...
This journey is hard, but if you keep your head down and learn fearlessly you'll get to the other side of it all and it's worth it. Not only is it a well paying field, it's also very fun and engaging work that I legitimately love to do. My journey still isn't over I still have so many things I want to learn and get better at, in programming the learning never stops and I'm looking forward to what I can do next
Also, if anyone has any questions about programming feel free to comment I'll try my best to answer every question I can.
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