Why I Write Code
After graduating university I thought I had it all figured out, go out there find a job related to what I had studied and see where that takes me. Fast forward, three years, and I was not happy with my career trajectory and out of a job. March 2020 had just arrived and Covid-19 had officially taken hold here in Canada and was declared a state of emergency by the provincial government. As if things couldn’t get worse, I was now unemployed and anxious about this new uncertainty plaguing the world. Little did I know there was a silver lining in all of this.
“So what now?” I asked myself. I couldn’t bear the thought of picking up another job just to be unhappy again so I decided to think about what it is that I truly want from a career. I realized that I had been living life like a fraud for far too long: working jobs that never made me satisfied or fulfilled, trying to make it in fields that I had thought would be lucrative only to go nowhere, etc. You see, I had always considered myself to be quite creative, I still remember losing myself in my creative endeavors (such as visual arts and writing) for hours on end but never pursued what I actually loved doing because I had bought into the idea of the “starving artist”. With time on my hands and being stuck in lock down I figured I should try this “follow your passion” thing, I mean what do I have to lose at this point?
So I went back to the drawing board. I made a list of the things I enjoyed doing in the past and how I could potentially turn it into a career. After some deliberation I narrowed it down to three potential areas I should explore: graphic design, copy-writing, and web development. These were the paths that I thought would give me a creative outlet and allow me to earn a decent living and gain more career stability while doing it. It was not long I before realized graphic design and copy-writing were a no go as someone who was trying to go the self-taught route. So that left me with one remaining option.
I was always under the impression that coding was a bunch of ones and zeros (and yes, I now know that’s binary and not something I should be too concerned about as a web developer) and that I needed to be good at math and science, boy was I wrong. So, I decided to learn how to code. For the next little while all I did was try to learn and write code and the more I end up doing it the more I liked it. So far so good, my HTML and CSS skills were getting better and I eventually decided to move onto JavaScript.
I found out that programming is hard, I just couldn’t wrap my head around it and how it all fits together. I struggled with JavaScript, so much to the point where I eventually gave up. A couple of months go by, and I just couldn’t let it go, something kept nagging me to get back into coding and when I did get back to coding it all finally “clicked” for me. I was getting better and having more fun, but yet again I hit another roadblock, there were still parts of programming that I continued to struggle with.
Going the self taught route, while definitely possible, was taking too long and I made many mistakes on trying building my own curriculum. I felt close to being able to land that elusive first gig but I needed more of a push, a more structured way to fill in my gaps and something to hold me more more accountable, a coding boot camp seemed like the way to go. I had heard good things about Juno College from others that have attended there, so I decided to enroll. As of writing, I had just finished my first week at boot camp and while I don’t know what the future holds for my career prospects or even whether this will all work out in the end I can tell you is that the light at the end of the tunnel does look brighter with each line of code I write.
If you have made it this far I would to thank you for reading, and if you are interested in checking out some of the things I have built(and currently building) check out my GitHub by clicking the link below.
