In the Beginning
This post is just a little background on myself and my journey thus far.
Young me was a pcmasterrace gamer. This sparked an interest in modding the software I was using and Windows XP.
My first “major” OS hack was changing the start bar to say “FreeFall”, my gamertag at the time. I even had a PS2 mod where I could play my own disks, which I utilized to add custom songs to Guitar Hero because the stock setlist wasn’t enough.

Ever since then, I preferred tinkering with software I was using rather than actually using it. Mistakes were made and much learning was achieved. One week I had to reinstall Windows XP 3 times because of small things I had broken.
Once I started at college, I came out of my shell of only talking to people on the internet to actually socializing with individuals around me. This led me to switching majors 3 times before eventually taking a break from college to figure out what was important to me and what I wanted to do. During this time, I worked as a busser at a restaurant and also started delivering pizza.
Delivering pizza was a great job, but that was all it was, a job.
I realized I wanted a rewarding career in something I was interested in and good at. Brainstorming for a while brought me to Chemical Engineering, as I was always excellent at problem solving, math, and chemistry.
I returned to college for this major and completed it with a 3.2 average GPA.
In my last 2 semesters of undergraduate studies, we started using VBA in Excel to solve our engineering problems more quickly and efficiently. This brought back my passion for tinkering with software in full force. I knew that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
My then girlfriend (now wife) already had a job lined up to begin shortly after graduation. I moved with her in hopes of finding a job also in the field but at the same time limited myself to the area because she is more important to me than a career in a field I do not actually have a passion for.
Over 2 years, I applied to many jobs in the field and only had 2 interviews the entire time. But also during this time, I realized that software development was a much more robust field to be in and matched my interests more closely.
The journey then started for turning this passion/hobby into a career.
I started with theOdinProject and freeCodeCamp, learning the basics of HTML/CSS/JavaScript. The Odin Project then took me to Ruby on Rails, which I love and use for personal projects and have used to make my father’s website responsive to mobile and update it to a modern framework.
I now am working every day to achieve my goals, and love learning new things and putting them to use.
It has been a long journey up to this point, but I am now extremely confident in my passions and my abilities to make software development a career and not just a hobby.
