Before I begin this lengthy, insane story, let me start by saying that if you, the reader, are in a situation that makes obtaining a career in tech seem like a lofty goal, I ask that you slap yourself in the face and in your best Cher voice, say to yourself, "Snap out of it!" Read my story and then reflect on your own capabilities of making a desired change in your life. Also, get comfortable; it's a long story.
It isn't uncommon to hear about unconventional backgrounds when hearing stories from other web developers. My unconventional background is no exception. I'm a college dropout who dedicated his twenties trying to find stardom as a dancer while supporting this dream with multiple jobs as a cafe cashier. I had stars in my eyes and tech was nowhere in sight in my radar. Next thing I knew, I was 28 and still working the bottom of the barrel without having put a modicum of effort towards achieving my dreams.
One day, last August, everything came screeching to a hault, like the sound of a vinyl record scratch. I had become aware of where I was in life, and that I was becoming complacent. I've never been the type to settle for anything less that what I wanted out of life, so I entered a state of panic from the realization of what I had done with my twenties. I was not happy with where I ended up, much less with my lack of desire to improve it. For the first time in a few years, I wanted better for myself.
Why coding, you ask? It was the timing of a serendipitously placed advertisement online for The App Academy. I had decided that a satisfactory change in my life would be a career that was mentally stimulating, and fell within my freakish ability to learn quickly. I took their reasoning test, passed it, and let that motivate me to take their prep course for Ruby on Rails. Not a day has gone by without me learning about coding to some degree. Even on days that I take off from learning, I often read articles related to web development whenever I could. I was on the verge of entering a positive mental state. Despite all the motivation I could ever want to enter a field that stimulated my brain, I still had other challenges in my personal life that needed to be faced in order to succeed in pulling off such a big career change. Again. Life outside of work was hitting me hard throughout my twenties with events that did a number to my mental health. I was depressed as a result, and coping with addictions I as in denial about at the time. My daily activities had been reduced to two things: addiction fixing, and learning web development.
I think I made it apparent by now that I was betting it all on a successful transition into web development. I had internalized my desire to learn web development as "a way out" of my state of addiction. I had been underestimating the control my addiction had over my state of mind. In hindsight, I believe that confidence that I would beat my addiction was my driving force to persist. I was consistent in my learning, no matter my mood, energy level, blood toxicity, etc.
Eventually I started to see progress in my learning. I enrolled in a 5-month bootcamp, where I experienced what Oprah calls an 'aha' moment, in learning fundamentals of ReactJS. I had come to a realization regarding how state and props are passed, which led to understanding the difference between function and class components, which led to understanding what a function was at all and how classes worked at the fundamental level. I live for 'aha' moments; the satisfaction of mentally 'levelling up' is what keeps me going wherever life takes me.{' '}
Although it seems my knowledge was growing, my skills were not progressing fast enough, much to my dismay. It dawned upon me that although I am familiar with JavaScript data structures and how to interact with them, I still found myself lost when trying to follow the logic behind the problem solving in simple coding challenges like the Two-Sum function. My drug usage had been doing me no favors either. What's more is that I was aware of the surface-level understanding of web development being taught to me. I wanted a much deeper understanding, and bootcamp got hit by the COVID pandemic, which made for a much more lenient grading system. I managed to graduate, but today I still struggle with reasoning like a programmer. The drugs hadn't left the picture either, and were obviously making knowledge harder to retain... but at least I had envisioned a path for myself with clear solutions to my problems. Stay clean, and master those JS fundamentals. Today my journey continues in November, and I am aware of many aspects of the web development culture I had not been taking part of. This blog, for one-- I had not been documenting my learning appropriately. I plan to mass-post abridged versions of the pages on pages of handwritten notes I've made. I'm taking my cleanliness day-by-day, telling myself each morning that I won't use. I have a 90% success rate with that, but I'm pushing for 100%. Since I started this journey I've read 13 books on web development (of which only 4 were mostly coding tutorials), and have another 15 downloaded that I plan to read. This, and a cigarette, keeps cravings to a minimum.
TL:DR; I didn't give up, and committing to a goal and routine work towards that goal is a more powerful motivator than I once believed it to be. So don't be discouraged. Time is a precious thing to waste, and the time you take learning is an investment for your future. I know my case is very unorthodox and somewhat convoluted, but I'm a year and some months into this and I've gone in too deep to drop this goal now. I must see my goals through. Commit to your goals. And I promise to write posts about actual coding from here on out.