I'm a Junior Software Developer and this is my story, pt.1

I spent 10 years in the food service industry and decided the spring of 2018 to attend a coding boot camp. I had told myself before attending culinary school in Georgia that food was all I had known and it's all I'd ever be good at. I put all my eggs in one basket and resigned myself to a life of working in a kitchen.

But boy oh boy did I sell myself short. I know I'm a smart guy who can achieve challenging goals things when I apply myself but I also liked being comfortable in a job even if it meant working through 12 plus hours on my feet all day. It works for some people but I was no longer that person and that's okay. I wasn't willing to make that personal sacrifice any longer.

My room mate attended a coding boot camp in Akron, OH. At the time I was a professional artisan bread baker working long hours early in the morning. When he would get home I would observe him practically doing magic on his computer. He would often excitedly try to explain to me what he was working on but it flew completely over my head. One look at the screen and the image came to mind of a movie character hacking a top-secret government file. I didn't at the time understand, but all it took was that brief introduction to unlock something in my brain that told me, hey you could do this.

So in the spring of 2018 I decided to start teaching myself how to code. I went through the web development section of freeCodeCamp, paired programmed with my buddy who had gotten a job out of his boot camp and regularly attended meet ups at the coding boot camp where I would eventually attend.

I was eager to begin school in the fall of 2018 but upon not doing so well in the technical assessment I was put on hold to the spring of 2019. I was very discouraged but used it as a motivating factor to take advantage of the next 8 months and learn as much as I could on my own in preparation so I could really hit the ground running. I continued to go through freeCodeCamp, worked on coding katas, attended meet ups, scheduled a few 1 on 1 lessons with my future teacher, and pretty much lived and breathed code until the 14th of January, 2019 when my life would forever change.