Hello World, My coding journey from Interior Design to Backend Engineer.

This seems to be the trend, make the first post a 'hello' of sorts, so, hello there.

My name is Vanessa O, and this is my Dev.to blog. I feel the need to tell a story so grab a cup of coffee/water/your favorite poison.

This is the story of my transition to a fully tech career.

It all started in 2007 when I read a book by Jefferey Deaver, The Blue Nowhere. Now, the book in itself was a fairly common story, one bad guy and one good guy, at least it was supposed to be a fairly normal story...that is, until I got to chapter 2.

I was introduced to the 'good guy', a computer hacker who built computers with anything from a spoon and a few batteries, he was bad but still less evil than the main bad guy.
The chapter numbers were in binary code and that was the first thing I noticed, so as a young kid, starry eyed and curious about everything, I went on a research on binary code and what it meant in computers, I. Was. Hooked from then on.

My First Time

The first thing I tried my hand on was HTML(Hypertext Markup Language), I built a very 2007 looking website with my basic knowledge of HTML, it was basically a page listing the different types of fish (I found it recently and Oh. My. Goodness). It was basic but that was the first time I got a thrill out of building something from nothing. I felt like I was well on my way to being the hacker from The Blue Nowhere.

Next came CSS(Cascading Style Sheets), now this was fairly easy to grasp, even then. I simply made some notes and thought "Sure, I'll just try to memorize all the color and font related tags" HA! (PS: This is 2020 me laughing at 2007 me).

Back to me and coding. So the next monster I had to slay was
JAVASCRIPT...DUM! DUM! DUM!

I am laughing writing this because I remember the almost impossible frustration I felt then, I had the idea that if I could just get past Javascript, I could become the hacker of my own dreams. Long story short, I gave up on my dream to become a social engineering sleek hacker when I hit the roadblock that was Javascript.

Architecture Calls

I should say here, I graduated with a Bachelors degree in Architecture from Obafemi Awolowo University. It was a ride and a half, filled with a lot of late nights, drawing and researching, and no-code. I was so focused on schoolwork, so I had no time to get back in the coding game, however, I did meet some interesting people who kept me close to the Code.

Graduation and more Javascript?

After school, I had a fun time working as an Interior Designer, but I was curious about the programmer part of me that was lying dormant like a lion in a den, waiting and watching for the right time to spring out. 2017 was the year of The Spring.
Cut to 2017, I made a list of all the skills I needed to build, and HTML popped up again, it took me a while but I added Javascript to the list, and then I got to learning. I breezed through HTML and CSS to conquer the beast that is Javascript, at least I thought it was a beast. Now however, I know it is a fire breathing hydra monster with 10 eyes.

Cheers to the freakin' 2020's

I'll cut the story here and bring you to 2020, 3 years and 1 internship, 4 programming languages and a lot of code review later, I have made the decision to go fully into tech. It was not an easy decision to make, I DID love building and designing houses, but I found that my curiosity is much more heightened when I have a coding problem before me.

Am I scared? Yes...Will I give up? It took me a long time to get to this point, so no, I am in it for the long haul. I will make Javascript my lover and probably drag many of you on my journey to building a community of Javascript lovers.

So, like I said, hello world and welcome to my Dev.to Blog.

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PS: If you're looking to start on your tech career this year, you can download this checklist of 14 careers in tech and the programming language you should learn first.