I am Become Coder, Creator of Code Things
Hi. I’m Andrew. I’m currently a developer-in-training at Makers Academy in London, learning the black art of software development.
After four years in desktop support, turning things off-and-on again and kicking the living shit out of all printers working or not, just for giggles, I decided to follow the most persuasive of the voices in my head and follow a career in development.
I have been dabbling with development on-and-off for many years but only decided to take it seriously when the above-mentioned job became too stagnant, and I stopped learning. I spent the better part of a year doing any home-study course I could find to upskill, to prove my worth for the development team there. My manager was supportive, however the team development lead and her manager were less so, despite her team crumbling and the skills gap, so eventually I gave-up on them and left for Makers.
Not much in life scares me, but leaving a comfortable job-for-life with decent benefits for unemployment for four months and dropping £8k on a training course out of my own savings is definitely one of them. What if I’m not any good at this? What if Brexit scares all of the employers and there are no jobs after I graduate? Those questions and many others consumed me but in the end, I decided to take the plunge because nothing good in life comes easily or without sacrifice or challenge.
During my ten weeks on-site at Makers, I’ve managed to increase my knowledge of development so much. I’ve managed to fill-in many gaps in my knowledge about the overall end-to-end process as well as concepts more minute like OOD and refactoring; hadn’t heard of that before starting out here. And then there’s my new best friend, TDD…never has failure been so useful!
This is probably a little late to start a blog about my journey as I’ve just finished week ten of the prescribed twelve of the bootcamp…better late than never, no?
This blog shall be about my journey into code. Welcome.
