Back in October 2017 I finally landed an IT job, after starting to teach myself coding in August 2013. The job I currently have is not really a developer job per se, but I do work with JavaScript and SQL and the HL7 protocol, as well as various specialized medtech systems such as Powerscribe and Mirth Connect.
My programming story begins in middle school, in the dark ages. I had already played with Algol – yes, using the old punchcards, and now I learned Basic. But sadly, I was trying to avoid being called a nerd (hey, I was a teenager) and so I drifted away from programming as time went on. In college, I majored inm Mechanical Engineering, which led to me taking classes in Quickbasic, Fortran77, and Pascal. In my MBA program, I messed a little with HTML and CSS – this was the early days of the Web – but as I said, I was a mechanical engineer, and that was where I was building a career.
In 2010, though, thanks to the crash of 2008, all that came crashing down. By 2013 I’d had enough and I started to teach myself to code. I found that I really enjoyed it – and wondered why I had ever quit at all! I took a certificate in Software Development at the local community college but it didn’t leave me much to show employers – building a portfolio isn’t part of the curriculum, although I learned quite a bit about programming. So when, in Spring of 2015, I discovered FreeCodeCamp, I was pretty excited. Here was a program with tangible lessons, a structured schedule, measurable results, and that would leave you with a batch of projects at the end for a portfolio.
And best of all, it was free!
So I began to work through the lessons, a little at a time while I worked part-time jobs to survive. A lot happened in my personal life too, most of it not so good. But I kept chipping away at the lessons and the challenges and finally in summer of 2016 I earned my front end devloper certificate, and had a nice portfolio of projects to show for it.
When I interviewed, my portfolio supplemented my resume and showed that I had the JavaScript skills needed and also showed that I could learn new things and apply myself. I wouldn’t have gotten the interview without it.
So now that I have a job, I’ve been focusing on learning the technologies used there, and in the meantime, I’ve been trying to learn React and work on the Back-End certificate. I’ve also been working through the beta for the next iteration of FreeCodeCamp, which has a lot more on CSS and SASS and so on. It’s an ongoing voyage, and I’ve really been enjoying it so far.
My Life and Times 