My Life 2.0
This post is recommended for beginners or those who seek to begin a career in programming.
So, I heard that you are curious about programming. I see that you’ve been looking around, wondering what a programmer does. You are quite the detective my friend and I applaud your appetite for this trade. In fact, not so long ago I happened to be there, sitting on your chair, sporting those very same shoes you are wearing today. And you guessed it, now I could probably call myself a professional programmer, sort of. You know what? Let me tell you how it all happened:
I am not like you dear reader, I was not born a 31337 h4x0r, I was just a really cute baby that seemed to enjoy life back then in Venezuela in the late 80s.
The years passed and that baby ended up being a really curious and very energetic kid, so much so that you could see him dismantling his toys, trying to see their guts and trying to figure out how things worked. I remember I had this very cool cobra-thingy-water-spitting RC toy car that was as exciting back then as a drone would be now. I played with it for like a month before it ended up in 10 pieces at the bottom of my trunk of toys. Those were the times (amirite?).
Around that time, while my parents were trying to maintain most of my toys in working order by keeping them away from me, my papa happened to get this new piece of technology that would pretty much become the next big thing in my life: he bought a programmable computer. The glory my friends, all that Windows 3.1 heavenly delight. My first PC, can you imagine? And also, can you guess what happens when you get a new techie thing and leave it around curious electric kids?
Far from seeming smart, my parents thought I was a real menace who would destroy anything he touched if given the chance but, c’mon, I just wanted to play. I just wanted to learn. The same way you are doing now dear reader. Of course, childhood offers what could be the most handy super power that a human can wield when he wants to learn something new: fearlessness. If you are scared of breaking it, you most likely won’t bend it far enough.
It was around this time that programming ignited a flame in my heart that would continue to burn to this very day. But I digress. After enjoying my childhood and d̶e̶s̶t̶r̶o̶y̶i̶n̶g̶ playing as much as I could, the teenage years came rolling in, along with those responsibilities that kids must face. Those meager and insignificant choices like, what do you want to study? What will you do for a living? What is going to the shape the rest of your life until that last breath squeezes out of your decaying carcass’ mouth? Trivial stuff any 14 year old boy has already figured out.
So, what did I want to be? Medicine was out of the picture. Having a blood sample taken from me always played out like the death of a family member as I am insanely scared of needles. Chemistry was boring. Math was crazy. Arts? If only stickmen were regarded as well as cubism. Professional gaming was not a thing yet, sadly. So, the choice was very clear. I looked it up and systems engineering was only taught at colleges at night. So I made the calculations and designed my plan, presenting my orchestration of life to get my parents approval. Easy-peasy.
And guess what? They said no. It turns out that Systems Engineering was only available at nighttime and thus, my father said that memorable phrase that went like “no kid of mine will study at night and become a slacker”. Tough luck kiddo. To cut a long story short, I ended up studying Electronics Engineering like my papa. The cool part was that electronics required at the very least some amount of coding. The lame part was that there were very few jobs at the moment that actually involved coding.
So, happy happy joy joy and everybody lives happy, the end, right? Not a chance. Along the way, Venezuela crashed and burned. Badly. So I had to emigrate completely alone, leaving everything and everyone behind… Choosing another country to be my new home. That country was Argentina. The romantic in me could not leave Latin America behind for good. Probably.
Emigration is not easy. I ended up in a house sharing a room with 4 guys and a bathroom with 20 people. To be honest, I didn’t mind. Well… maybe a bit but, what it really meant to me was this: my own very new beginning. A chance to start over. Here I was, right at the bottom of the stairs. I had nowhere to go. I had nothing. I had no one. Dramatic violin plays in the background.
Why would you care? Well, it was right at this time that the idea came to me, maybe I could be a programmer. Oh yeah baby! The time came to realize my long lost dream of hacking the CIA and getting those billions of dollars from stealing fractions of pennies from bank operations. Or the byte coins or whatever you kids do these days.
But c’mon, let us be honest, what chances does a guy in his late 20s have to change his career and get into the IT business? I honestly thought my chances were pretty slim. What constantly scared me was that, to me, I was already too old to try this. There was plenty of news about how the sector is dominated by kids. And they are so good at absorbing technology that being 10 years younger they already know how to make a Facebook clone in days. How was I going to compete with that? My second fear was that, with no real background in programming, how could I possibly land a job? They usually ask for a Phd. in Computer Sciences with 10 years of experience and 20 years of age. I guess in that universe time travel is already solved.
Well my friend, do you know that feeling you get when you ask yourself if you should have gotten the Hershey’s chocolate bar instead of the Kit-kat? Yeah, I was not going to let that happen to me. I was going to get that Hershey’s and be a programmer or I was gonna die trying! Or not die and just get a regular job in my field. Whatever, don’t judge me.
Now, hands on fellas. How do you go from “yeah I could make that Excel formula for ya” to “we are missing the kubernetes node port configuration to get the JDBC working in staging”? I wish I knew but, you know what I did? I worked my sweat cheeks off. From the moment I decided to become a programmer, I knew I was going all the way in with blood, sweat and tears.
Keep in mind that the programming world is this ever expanding universe of technologies that seem to come and go, bouncing in and out of popularity and existence. Many technologies seem to come together and bundle up on certain sectors while others target niche activities in the world. Which one might be the right one for you? Well, my advice is that if you’re coming new, go for the big ones.
So, my plan was to get as much knowledge in one branch of these technologies and get up to speed as fast as possible into how to actually use them. Following my standard computer knowledge where Windows is king and Word and Excel are the main reasons to have a computer used in an office, I went ahead and chose C# as my programming language.
The thing is, how can you really show that you have knowledge about something? I mean, I could say that I am fluent in Spanish but, I would have to prove it somehow. The fact that I was born and raised in Venezuela would be a valid point, and in a similar way, I would need something to backup all the effort that I was going to put in.
Did you say certification? We are synced! Now I had a plan with a clear goal (the certification) and a clear path (C#). Fire in the hole.
I spent two months studying from dawn to dusk. I literally woke up before anyone else and fell asleep after they were loudly snoring. Enrolling on free MOOCS, reading hundreds of web pages, chewing through books, burning my retinas like a champion and, most importantly, practicing.
Programming — for the most part — offers you this unlimited virtual world where you can constantly try and test, bend and shape to your heart’s content, break if necessary and mend back again. It gives you almost unparalleled freedom to experiment. It lets you play. I doubt NASA would let you crash a rocket. Who knows you scientific method?
So, practice is — for me — the most important activity of this process. From my point view it is through practice that one can begin to understand and predict the behaviour of the actions applied to any system and through this understanding extrapolate to future possible scenarios. Also, this lets you obtain that super power I told you about before: fearlessness. At the beginning, it is easy to be scared by the scale and complexity of this field — I find myself scared to death multiple times each month, to be honest — and by poking these demons with a stick you get to find out that most of them are just shadows, illusions made by the holes of knowledge that one currently has.
It was tough, but not impossible. Luckily we are living in a time where access to information is easy, quick and free in many cases. There are so many sources to learn from that the only thing stopping you from learning might be yourself. Go on and visit edX or Khan academy or even Coursera. These guys are quite known and popular. Just stick your head out and you will see resources aplenty.
So the day came to take the test. I was scared as hell as it was a life defining point for me. It was this or back to the trenches with the happy engineers. And what do you know, I actually passed it. Hooray! I had made my first solid step towards my new career. I was ecstatic, the door was open and that desired job was waiting in bed for me, I was gonna come through baby.
I finally had something that I could show that was going to have my back when the time came to prove to others if I really could make a program or something. Now I had to get in the ring and fight my way to the top. Pack your sunscreen and some sandwiches, we are gonna go hunting. For a job. I built this really cool resumé that was full of all the candies and toys to get those HR’s eyes.
Here I preferred to go shy, as I did not want to get my behind handed to me. I guess I was trying to hide from the possibility of failure, so I went to some web portals and sent my resumé to a couple of job posting, 4 in total. And man, all 4 of them called me. Desperate much? But I was as excited as I was nervous.
The universe has this weird way of setting things into motion, like that time when you took too much vodka and had that tatoo made on your face. Priceless. What? It was in a movie you say? Oh right. A movie. I seem to recall that they made like 3 of those.
Mm… You know what? Let’s leave this story at this point and we’ll take it up in part 2. Stay tuned!
