I have tried studying for a professional degree in engineering as well as a business degree and not being able to complete either one of them has made me felt like I’ve been hit by a truck of missed opportunities. I was at my lowest point in my life during that time, I was lost. I had no idea where I would be heading in life, avoiding family members, friends, secluding myself from society.
My entire life I grew up picking up skills over the internet and always have been open to try out new things. It would be embarrassing to list some of them out here but I’ve learnt to accept that it has made me who i am today and without them, i would have never been the developer today.
I was always fast on my feet when I’m motivated and wanted to learn something new. Web development happened to be one of them, html and css was the first stepping stone. It was fairly easy to understand and thought it was going to be just that… until i got into javascript.
Javascript deserves it’s own section, it has a whole ecosystem behind it which i will not be explaining here. Javascript is a programming language and it has thought me how to think, i have thought myself frameworks such as react which is developed by Facebook to help you create dynamic and re-usable UI.
I was working 2 part time jobs, studying in between whenever I can and bought a programming book, which to this day I haven’t completed. 5 months went by, a friend of mine pushed me into finding a developer job even though I thought I was not ready but i went on with the job search nonetheless. I went for my first interview and got the job, the feeling at the time was all too surreal.
There were so many things I didn’t know but my seniors helped me fill in those gaps. I had completed a couple websites and i got lazy having to repeat myself over and over, so I looked into where i could decrease my workload and automation was the way to go. Gulp was my answer, it did my image optimization, minify my CSS, removed the unused css in my style framework, uglified my JS. Improving the performance/page speed of my websites by a huge margin.
12 months went by, I wanted to give myself a new challenge by finding a React JS position and here I am now, a software engineer for the number one job portal industry in Asia who is willing to guide me to be a full stack developer. I am forever grateful for this opportunity and especially to Free code camp! someday I do want to continue my higher education in computer science in the coming future. Please do let me know if this is a good idea.
Thanks for reading my post!