How did I become a Web Developer Part 1

This article was originally post in riosjaime.com

1. Learning to Code take 1

During my life, I was first introduced to coding in high school, around 2007. It was a required course for those who wanted to become engineers I didn’t have much choice.

There we would learn about variables, data types and loops in Pascal. Despite their good intentions, the education we received there was rather messy, most relevant programing languages are written in English. Since neither the teacher nor the students were English speakers, so debugging errors like

Error : This must be a boolean value.

was incredibly frustrating since we couldn’t understand the documentation and the teacher was not the best explaining. Most lessons were focused on the logic of things like a foreach loop rather than building something useful.

2. First contact with Web Development

This was also a required course by the school. They would teach us during a semester how to create basic HTML static websites with some inline CSS. SEO optimization was not that relevant. All we learned was relevant, screen resolution was not something to worry about, that lasted two months until the first iPhone was introduced to the market.

The project was supposed to have working links to at least four pages, it was hosted on some “Yahoo Sites” freemium service. I remember spending a whole night trying to upload my project before the deadline, I deprived my self from sleeping just to find that I’ve had everything done three weeks before the deadline.

3. Learning to code take 2

This was somewhere around 2012. Now as a Industrial Robotics Engineering student, I was required to learn Programing Fundamentals. The programing language was C++.

And it very similar to what I experienced in high school. We were introduced to fundamentals like data types, variables and the concept of IDE.

Same mistakes, new environment. This time I was the only English speaker in the room. I learned most of what I needed on the internet while eating pizza during the weekend, it was interesting but no one never showed us what you could be capable.

4. I want to develop an app for Android

After the course was finished, no more programing was taught in the course, at least not for two years. I looked for resources but could find a site that was newbie friendly. Then I started to look for a local programing camp, course, school, lord of the code or someone who could teach me how to it.

I found a free conference about how to get started. I got lost looking for the place since the address was not the actual location. While being lost I made a friend, but never an app.