Student from Germany who fell in love with coding and the tech industry after pivoting from a traditional career in banking. Currently pursuing a Bachelor's in CompSci.
I spent the last two years pivoting from a career in banking to software engineering. While I'm still in school, I'm learning coding & developing applications and programs in my free time.
I think the first touchpoint I've ever had with programming, was creating spreadsheets I'm Excel. Most of my colleagues were 50+ years old and my job was to make a spreadsheet staff planner that was easy to understand and maintain - so, I completely overengineered it with conditional formatting, automated sorting and stuff like that - but it was super fun to build and present. I would even go as far as saying this created my inner motivation to dive deeper into programming.
A year later, after quitting my old job, I started Codecadamy's Python Introduction and found it nothing but boring. All I really did was printing some text so a console or calculating the taxes of some imaginery receipts or stuff like that. I neither felt productive nor excited.
Some months passed and I ditched the whole software thing. Then I stumbled upon HTML and CSS. And boy, that was easy as hell! I mean, I knew it wasn't real programming but was able to build a decent website after one afternoon of doc-skimming and tutorials. After building my first website I knew that this was the kind of thing I enjoy doing! So, I kept on adding stuff to my website. I discovered Bootstrap and my sites went as pretty as those of the big companies! I discovered JS and started to add features that required real programming! I discovered APIs to rebuilt technologies that before seemed like a black box to me. With ReactJS, I was able to create components or, like I explain it to others, create my own, improved HTML tags!
And even today, I'm mindblown with everything I learn. Today I started to play around with Backend WebDev, built my first server with node & express and I really like to learn more about it and going full-stack.
Long story short: Web was and still is the most rewarding journey for learning programmers. Every step gives you visual feedback and that motivates you to keep on learning.
Oh, and it doesn't mean that I won't learn any other thing afterwards - I'm even certain I will give Python a second chance as I'm interested in Web Scraping and building my own ghetto APIs.
In a couple of months I finally start my computer science degree. So I can learn the deeper roots of the stuff I'm working on in my free time and how to make it more productive - maybe I'll end up doing something completely different than web, but still I think it's the best way to start.
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I spent the last two years pivoting from a career in banking to software engineering. While I'm still in school, I'm learning coding & developing applications and programs in my free time.
I think the first touchpoint I've ever had with programming, was creating spreadsheets I'm Excel. Most of my colleagues were 50+ years old and my job was to make a spreadsheet staff planner that was easy to understand and maintain - so, I completely overengineered it with conditional formatting, automated sorting and stuff like that - but it was super fun to build and present. I would even go as far as saying this created my inner motivation to dive deeper into programming.
A year later, after quitting my old job, I started Codecadamy's Python Introduction and found it nothing but boring. All I really did was printing some text so a console or calculating the taxes of some imaginery receipts or stuff like that. I neither felt productive nor excited.
Some months passed and I ditched the whole software thing. Then I stumbled upon HTML and CSS. And boy, that was easy as hell! I mean, I knew it wasn't real programming but was able to build a decent website after one afternoon of doc-skimming and tutorials. After building my first website I knew that this was the kind of thing I enjoy doing! So, I kept on adding stuff to my website. I discovered Bootstrap and my sites went as pretty as those of the big companies! I discovered JS and started to add features that required real programming! I discovered APIs to rebuilt technologies that before seemed like a black box to me. With ReactJS, I was able to create components or, like I explain it to others, create my own, improved HTML tags!
And even today, I'm mindblown with everything I learn. Today I started to play around with Backend WebDev, built my first server with node & express and I really like to learn more about it and going full-stack.
Long story short: Web was and still is the most rewarding journey for learning programmers. Every step gives you visual feedback and that motivates you to keep on learning.
Oh, and it doesn't mean that I won't learn any other thing afterwards - I'm even certain I will give Python a second chance as I'm interested in Web Scraping and building my own ghetto APIs.
In a couple of months I finally start my computer science degree. So I can learn the deeper roots of the stuff I'm working on in my free time and how to make it more productive - maybe I'll end up doing something completely different than web, but still I think it's the best way to start.