How I Owned Life
My life story with tips on how to own life like I did - A good toilet read.
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For those who do not know me, my name is Dan and I am an application and web developer. I grew up from a family of a single father and a sister until I was about 6 or 7 when my father remarried. Growing up, we did not have a lot of money. My father worked hard enough for our family to get by and enjoy the basics of life until he was murdered in 2002 by a drunk driver. Afterwards, I lived with my non-English speaking stepmother until I turned 18 and graduated high school with a 2.4 GPA.
I went to college to challenge myself. It was a waste of $35,000. My web development class was teaching how to make websites using Adobe Dreamweaver’s Drag and Drop Table feature (For the non-developers, this is a big no no in the 21st century digital world, think of it as racial segregation). I simply refused to do this on the final and got marked down 10 points for using pure HTML5/CSS3. Sure learning how to make layouts in tables could be a history lesson for the 90s and early 2000s in the progress of web development, but if you decided to tell your future employer you can only make websites using tables, good luck getting hired.
During my sophomore year in college, I scored a nice internship at a Fortune 500 company doing simple application and web development. I was getting paid about $15 an hour for this gig and coming from freelance and small jobs ($7.50/$8.00), that was a lot of money- to me at least. I was happy. About half way through my summer internship, a key developer of the company’s intranet quit and I took over his responsibilities. I had no idea of what I was doing. Before he left, he gave me a one-hour crash course of how to do his job (he was at this company for over 5 years) using an ASPX based content management system (CMS) known as Publisher. Coming from a background of PHP/HTML5, I saw Publisher as the biggest piece of shit system I have ever used in my life. It was slow, 10 years dated, and crashed 60% of the time. I fought through it, learned the system, and developed my way to keep a consulting job with the company over the next year. While consulting, I somehow became the lead front-end developer and content manager for their .com and mobile site. I had a lot of power for a 20 year old college kid.
I had a taste of success. A year later, I graduated from college a semester early with a 3.5 GPA. Politics kicked in at this Fortune 500 company and I switched companies to a Georgia based start-up prior to my college graduation. My salary increased about 88%. At this new job, I was doing front and back end development. There were a lot of problems before I came on board to take over development for this company. The site was slow (it runs on a WAMP server…yes, a corporate website running on a Windows WAMP server [again for non-developers, an analogy for this is eating off-brand cereal versus eating the good stuff]), it was huge (1300 pixels fixed to be exact), it was not mobile friendly, and it was still using a deprecated Salesforce.com feature known as Web-To-Lead. I started the initiative to redesign the site making it mobile friendly and created extensions that allowed leads to be captured using the Salesforce.com API. I also started the initiative to upgrade the server to a LAMP stack model and say good-bye to the 2000 era. I had a lot of success at this company internally but externally, team politics kicked in.
Unfortunately for me, since I was young and just joined the company, I did not have much say-so in what went on server-side and how new projects get started. Because of this, a lot of the new projects kept circling back to me to fix because the initial implementations were wrong. I worked for the company full time for 6 months, and for 4 of those months, I was part of zero of the initial project kickoff meetings. I was doing the same shit, over and over, until it became nuisance. I basically lost the desire to code and desire to learn. I decided to quit this job and pick up a new gig.
And so it begins again. New job, new responsibilities. I still code, but I now have a say so in what goes on in the projects. I am now a part of meetings that determines the outcome of the projects and these projects are being developed quicker, smarter, and more efficient. Only one month in and my desire to code and learn has came back, instantly. My salary also increased again by 40%.
If you have been following along, you’ll notice I give most of my salary from these jobs. If you do the math, you will know a good range of how much my salary is at 22 years old. I would like to iterate that I am not a man that is “in it for the money”. I have a desire to code and a desire to learn new techniques to improve my code. The money from my employer is just a needed part of life. I plan on donating a good bit of my earnings in the future once I pay off the debt. A golden rule of life is to never get greedy. Be successful, give back.
The purpose of my story is to teach you how to be successful. I grew up from having nothing and working a boring job in college, making little to no money, eating Ramen noodles and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for a year. I envied my rich friends who had life handed to them on a golden platter. I always wondered when and how I can make enough money to enjoy a sliver of life like them. This is not external success- I did not invent the iPhone, create Twitter and sell it for millions- this is personal success. Personal success comes with hard work and hard work brings personal success. This theory is correct with both sports and life. I hope that this is another one of those success stories you read and go “damn, this guy is not that much better than me, I can do this shit too”. If you hate/envy me for my success, good. I hope you hate and envy me enough to strive to be better than me. I am a prime example of the outcome of hard work and I would like to share that success tastes fucking awesome.
1: Be Nice, Make Friends
Social skills are an important factor of life. You can be the most badass developer on the planet, but if you cannot speak a sentence to a new face, you are in deep shit. Take some lessons in people skills, smile a little bit, and have confidence in yourself. Believe that you are a badass and you will become badass.
2: Don’t take life too seriously
Drink a beer, read a book, play some video games- whatever it is, do something that makes you happy. Do not cry over spilled milk. A quote I lived by in high school is Shit Happens, Life Goes On. That is probably why I graduated with a 2.4 GPA but at least I got out and took the next step. I learned from my mistakes and improved on how to be a successful person (see tip #3). Do not let the small things in life get in front of what you are trying to achieve, just brush it off and continue on your path. People who know me see me as one of the most relaxed guys on the planet. I do not stress about anything. Just pretend that life is a big Jigsaw puzzle and a piece of that puzzle is an inner puzzle (see what I did there?). Your inner puzzle is your work/school challenges. Once you complete those challenges, you completed that puzzle. Attach it to your accomplishment block and move on.
3: Learn More, Fail More
You learn by action, not statements. It is completely ok to be burned by the 10 at the bar. The fact of the matter is if you have enough guts to speak to the 10, you have enough guts to speak to the 7. For those who did not understand the analogy, never say no to your skill. If you have not realized it by now, anything in life is possible. Man on the moon? Model-View-Control JavaScripting? Touchscreen portable 24-hour battery mini computers? Hell yeah. Keep dreaming, attempt to accomplish those dreams, and do not quit. If you run into roadblocks, step away and tackle it later. As Giacomo Casanova once said, “One who makes no mistakes makes nothing at all.”
If your skill is development, learn a new technique or learn some new programming languages. Do not let that skill get dry and do the same old techniques over and over- you will become another dated professor teaching people the new wrong way on how to do things. Sure MVC JavaScript is cool right now, but what will happen in 3, 5 or even 10 years? Keep evolving your skillset as you age and your skillset will thank you in life later.
Now you are probably wondering why you should listen to a 22 year old. The truth is, you should not. You choose your own path in life and that path will guide you. These are just my tips on getting on a successful path. Like I said before, I grew up from having nothing to having much more than an average 22 year old should have. Remember that money is not everything, you will get to where you want to be if you are hungry enough. Money is just an object and fortunately for me, I do not have to worry about it for the time being.
These tips work for any career- I only emphasize web development because it is my career. NFL players did not get to the NFL by being lazy (except for Mark Sanchez last year for the Jets and Tony Romo of my fantasy team), they worked their asses off. Be proud of your successes and accomplishments. Be confident in your skills, learn to be a badass in what you love to do and what you love to do will love the shit out of you later in life. Do not be greedy, but never settle for less than what you believe you are.
I do appreciate all of my past educators and peers in helping me accomplish what I have accomplished today and dedicate this post to you all; You all know who you are so please know that I am grateful everyday for what I have learned through you. I will pass down my knowledge in hopes to help others succeed.
Do not forget to smile from time to time, hug a stranger, and do what you love to do.You have one path with two directions: Up or Down. Choose wisely.
