First of all, sorry for my English, as English is my second language.
Iām from Indonesia. I knew FCC last year, before that I was playing around with codecademy.
I always consider myself as a geek, I love trying new techs and reading books about computer programs despite my major in literature and my job as language teacher and translator.
My first attempt was in 2008 and I was trying to teach myself Java but failed and I stopped trying, and then in 2010 I got web translation job, that was the time I fell in love with web development. when I downloaded the web file and opened it in Ms.Word (I didnāt know IDE) and saw lines of HTML code I was fascinated with the idea of web development, I thought āwow, itās amazing, how with lines of code you can make something useful and beautiful at the same time.ā That was my trigger to teach myself HTML and CSS and because of these skills I got a job as webmaster for a trading company, I didnāt touch coding at all because the companyās website was using wordpress.
After 4 years working as worpress webmaster (still teaching too), I decided to switch career as web developer, but I didnāt know where should I begin. Out of nowhere as Universe listened my dream, some link about codehour (Hadi Partovi) brought me to another link, I ended up watching youtube video about programming Why Our Kids Must Learn to Code and it made me enrolled to CodeCademy and later in FreeCodeCamp.
I spent a year trying to figure out JavaScript puzzle in FCC as English is not my mother tongue, but I kept repeating it and finally understood how JavaScript works, but I still have to learn it more deeply.
at this time I also fell in love with rails and trying to follow all tutorials about cloning web apps with rails.
I am still at front-end intermediate project but all the puzzles Iāve passed, built a stronger basic front-end skill for me.
As Iām 33 years old now, I have the urge to get a developer job as soon as possible, so I applied to many front-end job vacancies, surprisingly I got many interview invitations despite I donāt have IT degree, just personal rails projects in github and FreeCodeCamp projects and competing with younger developers with experience or fresh graduates that agree with entry level salary.
I just believe in law of attraction that if I have passion universe will open doors for me, some interview made me loose confidence, as one interviewer underestimated me by saying that Iām a late gamer, too old to apply for developer job, it was very uncomfortable moment, I lost my confidence, but one article about age issue in applying developer job, made me confidence, because the article said if the interviewer said that to you, it means he is looking for fresh graduates that are willing to receive low starter salary.
I decided not to give up and kept sending resumes, surprisingly one great startup in my city invited me to get an interview. I had nothing to loose so I did my best in the interview and 2 weeks later I got accepted and they offered me experienced (mid-career) developer salary. I keep wondering until now, why they offered me this job, maybe I guess they considered my passion in learning programming, and I owe big thanks to FCC for giving me strong foundation in front-end skill. THANKS FCC