When I was a kid, my biggest (and fairly common) dream was creating a video game. I would spend hours and hours drawing, creating characters and trying to find inspiration to write their stories.
Back then, I didn’t have the same amount of resources (not even close!), in order to learn how to build software.
Well, years were passing by and that inspiration flame was slowly fading out, to the point I already had much higher priorities, both as in hobbies and a future career.
Until, a couple of years ago, I have noticed that my curiosity about technology functionalities under the hood was still there. Mild at first, but still present.
HTML, CSS and JavaScript
During a certain day, sick at home, is when I first had contact with web dev technologies. Mostly through YouTube videos and of course, the W3 Schools platform. Using the web to learn how itself works.
It was not about video games creation at this point, but I knew I can always dedicate on that eventually. I knew that learning web fundamentals would give me a more simple introduction to software as a whole.
This way, I have realized that going back was not an option and I wanted to dedicate a lot of my free time practicing that initial stack, always looking around for new related tools, such as JS libraries and frameworks.
From hobby to career
Later on, although I knew the fundamentals needed for working on the field, I’ve noticed that the big majority of companies would only consider a higher level of experience, beyond my scope of knowledge.
A Computer Science degree was not an option at that moment, so I kept looking for similar opportunities for some kind of graduation, which would give me a more reliable and solid start from the ground up.
That’s how I found the Flatiron School.
With a very basic experience on software development, I decided to immerse into the online Software Engineering self paced program.
During my video interview to join the school, I felt like I was casually chatting with someone about the field. It was literally the easiest career related interview I’ve ever had. When I got accepted into the program, I couldn’t be any happier. I knew it was a whole start to my new career and I would never move back from that day.
Today, I basically finished the program. How did it go? What have I learned? Was it worth it?
I’ll type about that on my next post…
