Super powers back with JavaScript
Getting my super powers back after 22 years of programming absence!
The startup
Around 22 years ago, or more accurately in October 1995, I along with my brother created a startup. We created WebHouse.
I was at the time a pretty okay software developer, and had all my skills from the good old Microsoft DOS days of programming batch files, which later turned into full database and UI development with Turbo Pascal and later on Borland Delphi. I pretty much knew what I was doing.
But I gave it up, the coding part — to become a founder and CEO of what would be the first Danish Web Agency, WebHouse. So I haven’t done any coding since 1995 … until more or less NOW!!!
The modern super hero
It wasn’t that I had regrets about my earlier choices of giving up coding. For most of the time I have, and still love sales, business development, customer workshops, and setting up projects and innovate new products which our DevOps team set sails on. But I lost my super powers along the way.
The true super heroes of today is software developers. Coding is the new literacy.
A clever guy (Steve Jobs) someday said that:
“you should learn how to program a computer because it teaches you how to think!”
Getting back into coding …
So what happened. Well, to be honest, I just couldn’t factor what I was missing in life, I have everything I want, 4 lovely kids (+ 2 awesome bonus kids) and an amazing girlfriend and my own company, what’s not to like?
Something was missing, like a big abyssmal void … and finally it struck me some late night in September 2016. I just had to get back to coding again. I just had to get my super powers back, and re-awake one of my biggest passions in life, software development and solving “real” problems (which my company WebHouse masters), but this time as a code contributor myself.
Not like riding a bike …
Many uses the term “just get up on your bike again” and move on. Easier said than done. After 22 years NOT riding a bike your body and muscle memory will get you back into riding respectably in 10–20 minutes. Getting the feel again, and the balance. No problem. The challenge is … coding is NOTHING like riding a bike. So this is tough work, every day I put in hours and hours of coding exercises, reading online tutorials, and watching videos and immensely enjoying it. I follow a lot of awesome tech people on Twitter and Medium, attend meet ups, and I am really putting effort into this journey.
Follow through
It will take tons of hours but I will succeed. So at the same time of running a company all day building full-stack web applications, mobile apps and JavaScript frontends, I spend evenings and often half the night learning and trying and eventually getting actual working code … working. Sleep deprived but a happy guy!
11 months in and still climbing …
So here I am, around 11 months on the path of regaining my super powers, and I just love it, it rocks my world in a profound way. And that’s just the good part in general, the less good part is that I am actually more than 22 years behind all those amazing kickass open source JavaScript coders which I admire endlessly. But it is NEVER to late to learn!
Yoda said that Luke was to old to begin his training!!! The rest is history 😉🔥
So what have I been working on?
I started out learning some common vanilla JavaScript and fumbled around with different NodeJS services, Docker, NodeRed, Travis and a bunch of the tooling around building JavaScript based infrastructures and services anno 2017.
I advanced to start working with ReactJS and the amazing styled-components together with other JavaScript passionated collegues, and this effort has ignited the beginning of yet another React based UI framework called ODEUM CodeJS.
ODEUM CodeJS is still in the very early stages and will in time become a platform for designers and frontend developers to quickly create administrative web apps and interfaces for business workflows. WebHouse will soon be using ODEUM CodeJS to build all our web apps and later on mobile apps through React Native.
Ohhh the power
So did I get my super powers back. No not fully yet, but like “The Flash” I am beginning to feel lightning sparks fly around inside me, and that is half the journey. It makes me happy and my powers are growing day by day.
So if you are in a position where you think that you’ve gotten to old to pick up programming and software development, think again … and get started … get hacking and get your super powers too 😉 🔥
Luke, learn about the force!
If you liked the story of my getting back into programming, please give me a clap (or a hand on Github).
Thanks 🙏🏻
