Why I am Changing Careers to Software Development
My thoughts on why I decided to get into software development, and switching careers.
Some History
In high school, I decided to take a class in Computer Science based in Java. At the time I was looking forward to making a game or something interesting, and was disenchanted when we delved into nothing but algorithims and data structures; I did, however learn a few things that would later become useful.
Fast forward a few years, in the summer of my sophmore year of college (2010), I started to read about people building interesting things with something called an Arduino which is a microcontroller programmed with a language based on C. One of the most interesting things that I saw someone had made was a remotely operated vehicle or ROV which is basically an underwater robot with a camera controlled from the surface. Since I was in school for Ocean Engineering I decided that I absolutely had to build one, so I ordered the parts I thought I would need including one of those Arduino boards that everyone was talking about; and there I was, back to looking at a cold piece of metal and silicon that would do absolutely nothing unless you could explain to it what you wanted. Fortunately, since everyone was talking about the Arduino, there was a plethera of documentation online on how to get started in programming in a friendly way. Since I had the whole summer to myself, I spent just about every waking moment building my ROV and probably just as much time Googling all the problems that I was running into.
After struggling through learning everything I needed as well as actually building the thing, I had a working prototype. It worked pretty well too for someone who understood only basic programming techniques and was pretty good with waterproofing things. Unfortunately, I discovered that no matter what you do on subsea electronics, it’s going to leak eventually. It didn’t matter though, because I was already hooked.
While in school for Ocean Engineering, I had to take a class in Matlab (a programming language used frequently in science and engineering); by that point I had already played around with Python and Javascript, so I felt pretty good about myself. I continued my degree plan using Matlab to do the hard math calculations for offshore structural design and still playing around with Python and Javascript as a hobby. It wasn’t until after graduating college and barely finding a job (in an only semi-related field) that I started to re-evaluate my career choices; all of this was mainly because the demand for junior offshore structural engineers was almost non-existent with the oil prices starting to go down.
In my tinkering with programming as a hobby I came across guys that had become developers by teaching themselves, and it was that hope that pushed me to really consider if I could do software development as a career. All of this came to a head almost a year ago when I married my amazing wife, who encouraged me to take the steps toward pursuing a career that I would enjoy.
Self Taught vs. Structured Learning
Well, I ended up doing both. I started as a self-taught guy and even built a wesite for a local small business on my own, which looking back now could use a little work. I learned a whole lot pretty quickly until I started to get too lost in all the rabbit holes of frameworks, languages, and tools. It was at that point that I plateaued in my learning and started to look towards more structured approaches. After trying a few different programs online and applying to a couple of different in-person bootcamps, I decided on the best happy medium which for me was Flatiron’s Learn.co program. This was the most cost-effective route and covered the technologies that I had become interested in, Ruby and Javascript.
TL;DR I decided to pursue a career in software development that sprung from a hobby, and I’m taking the slower, non-traditional way to get there
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