The Maiden Voyage — My Journey to Professional Developer or Bust
Usually when I think of a journey, my mind races towards adventure and excitement; but in reality, journeys aren’t always filled with rainbows and butterflies and maiden voyages sometimes have less than desired results.
The problem for most is that the internet has become a master at disguising these realities. A simple search will reveal just how easy it is to become a developer. The countless resources, bootcamps, and articles all feed into our human desire for instant gratification. They spoon feed us the success stories, the happy endings, the dream jobs, the big dollars, and the speed at which it can all be achieved.
Well I’ll be the first to tell you it’s not that easy; but that being said, it’s not impossible either. I hope that this publication can serve as an open book to document my struggles, successes, and things I learn along the way to becoming a professional developer through Headway’s Apprenticeship Program.
My journey to professional developer has been a wild ride to say the least. In the past 12 months I quit a stable job, completed a 12 week bootcamp, freelanced, landed my first development job, was let go from my first development job, almost gave up, landed some questionable jobs, quit some questionable jobs, and began my apprenticeship with Headway.
I am a 29-year-old apprentice and I couldn’t be happier. I have two degrees, have had 20 plus jobs, and made a decent living; but at the end of the day I wasn’t happy. I almost ended this journey because I started to believe the lies the internet was telling me about how easy it should be to become a developer.
Obviously I must be doing something wrong. It had been almost a whole year and I didn’t have my dream job and wasn’t making a fortune being a developer. However, the saying goes, “Nothing worth doing is ever easy.” Start embracing that because becoming a professional developer is hard work but the satisfaction of success is always worth it.
With that said, I’d like to leave you with some advice that I wish I would have embraced when I first started this journey: Be ready to fail! My biggest regret starting out was my fear of failing. This fear stopped me from exposing my code to others, stopped me from building, stopped me from growing. In the end this fear crippled me. I didn’t want others to judge me or to know how little I knew. Understand that you have to start somewhere and the community is accepting overall and helpful to newbies. So accept that you are going to fail but be ready to grow from those failures. Just like any maiden voyage, the catch 22 is you won’t know what you are capable of until you are willing to fail. You just have to begin.
