Last year, I started trying out coding on CodeCademy.com after a good friend of mine recommended I check it out, when I was asking her a lot about her new career as a programmer (which she jumpstarted by attending a bootcamp in 2018). I had been looking for a career-path change for a while, and I definitely noticed how stable and enjoyable her new career seemed to be. We grew up together, and up until she discovered programming (she also chose to learn coding after admiring the lifestyle/career of a friend in software development), I had never seen her so focused or engaged in a career path. Her lifestyle was also much improved compared to when she was in the service industry, not to mention she had a great job that she enjoyed, with good pay and benefits! Also, the bootcamp she attended seemed very open to people going through career changes, or with non-tech backgrounds, so it seemed much more accessible than other paths to a new career, like returning to university to begin a new multi-year degree.
I finally decided to see what coding is actually about, after months (maybe years) of pondering if it could be a good career for me, too. I went to CodeCademy’s site to check it out, and I just kept returning to the site day after day to keep learning a little bit more. I learned some very basic and introductory Ruby, HTML, CSS, and then spent most of my time doing their JavaScript lessons. After wanting to return to learn more each day, I realized this is definitely a fun way to spend your time and workdays. It is so rewarding to learn something new, and then be able to immediately see results from what you’ve created, whether by changing style with CSS, creating the structure and content with HTML, or building exciting interactive functionality with JavaScript. So, after continuing to learn JavaScript on my own in a very unguided way for a while, my interest continued to increase. I then attended a couple of online seminars (a few weekly lunch seminars, and a 2-day weekend seminar).
After enjoying learning with other people, and appreciating the guidance from the people who led the online seminars, I knew that I could definitely see this as the career path to help me build my future — and software! Since I am so new to learning in this field, I knew a structured curriculum with an organized learning environment would be the best choice for me to move forward. It is still very early in this new path, and I am currently still learning JavaScript. I look forward to continuing to learn even more about it when we also start to learn about React and other frameworks in the coming months. I also basically still know next to nothing about back-end programming, so I can’t wait to learn all about Ruby, Rails and that side of the developer world. I love that I will be a life long learner as a programmer. I am just getting started, so I definitely have a lot to learn still, but I don’t anticipate that will ever change — even down the road when I’ve been coding for years — which I’m very glad about!