Programming: from Hate to Passion

Hi and Welcome to anyone reading my very first story!

My name is Antoine and I am a 25 year old French currently living in the US. I am passionate about programming and have decided to write about how this passion was born and what I have done to keep it alive and make it grow! In this story I will talk about my first encounters with the Programming field and how I came from hating to loving it.

My relationship with programming started a while ago, and at first it was a relationship based on hatred. I hated programming and programming hated me (at least that’s what it felt like). I’m sure that if you are a programmer or an aspiring programmer you can probably relate to this. We all have had that feeling at some point that programming wasn’t made for us.

My story first takes place in a small city called Angers in the West of France, with my High School diploma in hand. A few open paths were in front of me and it was just a matter of deciding which one I was going to take. At that time I had no idea what I wanted to become. My father is an Engineer and I science was easy for me in High School so I decided to follow the same path and try to become an Engineer, in France this means that you have to prepare for a contest for two (extremely intense) years and then depending on how well you do you will be admitted in one or multiple schools. Walking along that path was my first post-High School mistake. Now that I can reflect on it I was mainly doing this because my father had followed that path, and he has been successful ever since.
In my opinion, making mistakes is one of the most important things in life, they help you learn and grow once you can reflect on them. So I learned from this, but as I was making this mistake I encountered Programming for the first time. We had to code some Math problems using Python (a programming language), honestly I do not remember much about it, I was not motivated at that time. But this first encounter certainly did not leave a positive mark on me.
So I went back on that path and there I was again, standing in front of all those paths, not knowing which one to take. To make up my mind I decided to do a 4 months long internship to see what the working world was about. I learned a few things and decided that Economics was the right path for me, it was going to allow me to understand the world and open new paths for me once a graduate.

Three years later I was doing my final internship in Paris in order to graduate from the University of Angers (France) with a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. During this internship I had a task that consisted of sending an email to a mailing list for a survey I had created. I decided to take it upon myself to learn a bit of HTML in order to customise the email. It was a success and so that encounter with Programming was a good one. It almost felt like we had a moment… I was filled with satisfaction and accomplishment! Anyway, after that I decided to do an additional year of study to specialise in Data Mining, during this year I did a year long internship while studying. It was a good experience: I learned about SQL, Relational Databases, Statistics for Data Mining… I enjoyed writing some SQL but just like HTML it is different than working with an actual programming language.
After this year of specialisation I decided to start a Master’s degree with a focus in Data Analysis to help with the decision making process in companies. I got accepted and started the master’s degree in La Rochelle ( a big town in the West of France). Sadly it appeared that the master’s degree was mainly composed of programming courses and even though I tried to study Java (as I was asked to) while on a full time internship during the summer I was not able to reach a sufficient level in programming. The experience was awful, nothing was making sense to me, I didn’t even get what a variable was and I had to solve Master’s degree level problems. I had no time to get good enough to follow the program so I decided to drop out after 2 months in, blaming myself and the people who accepted my application.

After this experience I was convinced Programming was not meant for me, it was not my way of thinking. I was good at Economics and Statistics and I was sure that because the kind of thinking needed for these fields was different I would never be good at Programming. So I decided to do a one-year internship in New York City to make up for the fact that I wasn’t going to get a Master’s degree. 
This experience was great! I worked for a company developing Mobile Games and Applications. They needed someone to help gathering relevant data, make sense out it and build some ready-to-use analytics tools for Product Managers and Executives (such as dashboards with main KPIs and also some more advanced analysis). I was surrounded by developers, my mentor was a backend developer (he is now working at Google in Silicon Valley), and it was great… They were so passionate about what they were doing that they managed to pique my interest. I started looking into what they were working on, what they were doing on a daily basis and my mentor was giving me a few very basic programs to write. Seeing how passionate people could be about Programming and trying to understand how and why they were so passionate made me envy them so I decided to give Programming a shot even though I thought I’d never get along with it. Well I sincerely opened my heart to Programming and since then I have fallen in love with it. By the end of my year long internship I was taking a course online called CS50 from Harvard on EdX (MOOC) and I was having an awesome time doing so.

Programming is now my main passion and I want to become a Full Stack Web Developer or Backend Web Developer. To pursue that goal I am currently enrolled in Launch School’s program after having tried other things (I’ll talk about it in another story). I couldn’t be happier about giving a second chance to Programming and I can now see why all these people are so happy and passionate about it.
I will always remember that it is not because we had a bad experience with something that we need to indefinitely reject it from our lives. In my opinion, keeping an open mind is key to a better life.

To sum up :

Wow! That was a long story! I hope that for those who read it you can relate or get something out of it. If not, well I hope you enjoyed hopping on a ride with me through some key points of my past and that it was at least entertaining! See you on my next story!