I always tought about making a career switch and becoming a developer, but it always seemed to be so hard. So, other than “hacking away” at some existing projects I never really did any programming. Even as a “web developer” most of what I did was focused on using existing tools. Programming my own solution? Yes, I’ll look into that. After I try every single plugin I can imagine to solve this problem.
I tried programming in my free time. I always quite, because I didn’t really see a path forward. I still struggle with figuring out what I should be doing or pursuing next. So my “developer career” never took off.
Until I was forced to make a career change and became a “Jr. Developer”. Or whatever the correct label is. Initially things were off to a slow start. I did a lot of learning and studying of complex concepts. It’s not like I didn’t write code. I had to self-teach myself enough Python to interact with an API and exchange information. I built a small demo portal in C# with ASP.Net Core. But none of that ever really left my development environment.
That changed when I got assigned some other projects. Before that, anything I’d ever programmed rests in some “PHP Projects” folder on my computer. Or it’s uploaded on some corner of the internet, but I never gave anyone the link to it.
The last month and a half were interesting, because I finally started building things that people actually used. I went from never having built anything publicly used or available, to having built the following:
- * A web portal used by a big company (I’m talking prime time TV ads, nation wide brand awareness big).
- * An internal app for sales people
- * An “app” that reads an API which extracts data
- * An app that runs on *my freaking Xbox*
Okay, so maybe that Xbox app doesn’t really count since it only exists in a sandbox environment. But I was crazy excited when I saw the splash screen pop up on my TV. I built a thing. And ran it on my Xbox of all places. That’s so crazy.
I just felt like sharing that with the world, for some reason. So, here you go. I’ve made some progress in my development career and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store. Please don’t be Cobol. Anything but Cobol.