Becoming a web developer in Finland — an immigrants perspective
My name is Senad, I’m from Serbia, living in Finland and I’m a web developer now. But only a few months ago I wasn’t even sure if I could ever become one. So here’s how I did it.
It all started in the summer of 1989. I was 9 when I first got in touch with programming. Somehow I found a book in “Programming in Basic”. First, I copied all the code examples to my Commodore 64, not having an idea what they are for, because the book was in German. The last code example was playing some unknown short song. After a few hours I turned the code upside down but once I was done, it was playing ‘Smoke on the water intro’. I think that’s pretty much when I fell in love with programming. Back then, computers were not so popular, and programming languages were really different. I was already in high school when the internet started to grow rapidly, and programming started to gain on popularity.
Fast forward: I went through Mechanical Engineering studies at a University, got a job I wasn’t satisfied with, lost too much time searching for something meaningful to do… Long story short, I decided to move to Finland. As most of the immigrants, I started to struggle, not knowing the language, doing any job I could find. In the meantime I got married, my son was born… I was very happy, but there was a big piece missing — it was my career. Programming was always there as a hobby, so I decided to finally turn it into a career. I started attending an online programming school and after a year I had some knowledge in web development. I learned also about databases, servers, security and internet marketing. But still, I was always insecure in my knowledge, or even if I was learning the right stuff. I also had to work night shifts, so that didn’t help. Sometimes I was really worried about the future, and although my family was supportive, I knew I needed more help. I simply did not know where to seek for it.
Then, out of the blue, I saw a Facebook post about a program called Integrify. Shortly, it is an organisation that helps immigrants learn coding and landing a job. It sounded nice so I gave them a ring. They got me an interview date. When I got there, it was the first time in Finland when I actually felt like home. The guys were really nice and friendly and they understood my problems. I did a test and got accepted. Soon there I was, in Helsinki city center, a room full of people from all around the world, and we all shared one thing: love for coding. And it felt like home.
It is one thing to learn at home or at school, but this was completely different. We did lots of real world projects, working as a team and individually. Hours and hours of coding really made a difference. I also made contacts with people in the business, attended seminars and meet-ups. It was just the thing I needed to kickstart my career!
