Journey of a self-taught Developer

This here is going to be my first of many posts and I wanted to make it a short read. My next posts are going to focus more on things I have learned, tutorials, or just code projects I am working on.

Backstory

For as long as I can remember, I have always been in love with computers and I always thought I would end up going to college for a degree in Computer science but that was not the case. After concluding on my own that I would need an insane level of mathematical skill, I decided against computer science as a major and ended up in Psychology. While still in my third year of college, I got heavily into video games and felt the urge to make my own. One quick YouTube search and I started following tutorial videos centered on using the Godot game engine to make games.

Hello World

I began making platformers(platform type games) but still knew nothing about programming languages. One day while talking to a friend about my newfound hobby, he suggested I give web development a try and said it would help me gain great knowledge to make games. I decided to give it a try. I started learning JavaScript and from the moment I made my terminal output Hello World, I was hooked. I wanted to do more things, make my scripts. And so I got to learn about the three musketeers of front-end Web development (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). Started reading "For Dummies" books on JavaScript and following the set-out tutorials.

Reality Set In

After several failed attempts to make a project or finish an assignment without following a tutorial, it kind of hit me that maybe this was too hard for someone with no computer degree and that maybe this was for geniuses only. One thing about me at the time was that I was stubborn. I had always thought that I was good at school-related work and that it was probably because I had no time between school and work, to learn properly. Armed with that excuse as my weapon of choice, I persevered and went back for round two.

Another crushing defeat

After about 3 months of constant learning, I was still unable to create things from scratch. At this point, I was devastated and felt like giving up but thank the heavens for Twitter and YouTube. After learning that this was pretty much the norm in the tech world and changing my study strategy, I was able to make things kind of work. I spent more time reading books, more time typing, and more time drilling the basics into my brain, I kind of got a grasp on how things worked. I created my first project, which was a simple to-do list all on my own and I was ecstatic. I went down a hole of making projects, learning new technologies, and started tweeting more about my code-related activities.

How it's going

I spent the entirety of my third and fourth year learning new web technologies like react, node, express, MongoDB, PHP and have since been building projects using those tools. I graduated about six months ago and since then, I have spent my time building projects in hopes of landing my first real role in tech. I have recently started contributing to open source and learning about the basics of ethical hacking. Just yesterday I spent some time working on some subnetting problems. There are still ways to go but I keep looking.

For others

In case you are learning and you feel like you are not good enough or are struggling, I just want you to know that as long as you keep practicing, you will get better at coding. Learning to code is difficult and I won't lie to you. But the joy you get from just seeing yourself solve problems you thought were impossible and just feeling like you to some extent, know what to do in a field you knew nothing about just a couple of months or years ago is just unreal.