I once had a manager who told me the best thing I can do for myself in life is be proactive rather than reactive. He told me there’s no fun in living my life on auto-pilot and letting someone else be in the driver seat. With the recent global pandemic, I did just that. Unlike the millions of people who either had their income drastically decreased due to a change in their work schedules or those who were furloughed entirely, I was fortunate enough to keep my job. Albeit a bit of an adjustment, I was grateful to still be gainfully employed. It was not something that I wanted to take for granted though. I felt like my job was in jeopardy every day I’d log on to my computer and begin my remote work.
Being proactive doesn’t prevent discomfort, what it does do is teach you to think through that discomfort. I took working remotely as an opportunity to plan my next move. I was 26 at the time and each new year that passed in my 20’s consisted of learning a new skill. These skills ranged from things that I was able to monetize to things that would help me with the things I enjoyed outside of work. Ranging from web design and marketing to audio engineering and graphic design.
The stress of the pandemic coupled with my entire morning routine going to shit sprinkled with a bit of early onset depression had my mind in a frenzy. The last thing on my mind was what new skill I’d acquire in 2020. I picked up old habits that I began to disdain, I’d sleep in to 11 AM on days I had off. I’d play computer games all night. I started to feel terrible about the path I was going down. But in each dark moment there’s a silver lining. While playing computer games I met someone who had been a software engineer for about 21 years. We talked for hours about the field, the cool things he had done as well as the dabbling I did in coding in my younger years. At 13 I had began to learn C++ to code for video games. Talking to him reignited my passion for coding. I was quickly humbled when I thought about how much time had passed since I was last passionate about coding though. I told him that I was way too old to go back to school to learn it and I knew it’d be something that would take years to learn on my own with no curriculum. He told me that I wouldn’t have to attend a 4 year school to get into the field and now with the pandemic is the perfect time to actually consider getting into the field. He told me about coding bootcamps and showed me companies that were hiring students right out of bootcamps. Gone were the days of you needing a computer science degree and a bachelors to work in the technology industry.
Filled with excitement, I spent the whole night doing research on bootcamps. I had decided to enroll in one. I kept it under-wraps for the entire time I was there, very few people knew I was enrolled in school again.
My entire online presence was centered around me being a musician and I had just went dark to pursue this new endeavor. Up until that moment every new skill I picked up was centered around music as well. I learned marketing to be able to market my music better. I learned graphic design to be able to make my cover art. I learned web design to make my own website. Software Engineering seemed so far left from that, even to me. So I knew nobody would understand why I decided to veer off path for lack of a better term.
My bootcamp journey is another story for another day. I felt like it was important to give premise to where I am today and how I got here. But the experience and knowledge I’ve gained from attending Flatiron School is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life. I am truly grateful for the experience as well as the people I met, some of whom I’m still in contact with today. Flatiron taught me how to learn and that is a skill in and of itself. It surely has made the self teaching journey far less difficult.
Fast forward to today. I’ve been overjoyed all day after completing my first personal project. While in school I was learning so many things and following along to make sure I didn’t fall behind, so much so that I was never able to build anything on my own for fun. I decided that while I did this coding challenge I’d create 4 projects, one every 25 days to not only mark my progress but to remind myself why I began this in the first place. To have fun and to create useful tools for myself.
From day 23 I started building a streaming calculator that would be able to calculate how much money you would make from the amount of streams you got on each streaming platform. This was something that I used to use a Google Sheet for. To be able to create a dynamic web app using the knowledge I’ve gained and a bit of creativity on my end made me so happy. This is one of many of the ideas I have in my head that I’m happy I’m able to actually materialize.
25 days in and a lifetime to go.
