In the Beginning

On this long weekend, I've had some time to think about how to wrap up this blog. As I stated in my blog entry yesterday, when I reach a year's worth of entries on July 16th, I will be ending the streak of writing an entry every day. I don't know the fate of this blog completely, yet, but I'm pretty confident I will not continue to write a blog entry every single day. There were several purposes of this blog, one of which was for me, one for potential employers, and one for aspiring developers. The purpose for me was to have something to hold myself accountable to every day. If I knew I had to report in every day, I knew it would keep me from missing a day of studying. That, along with doing 100 days of code on Twitter, of which I'm now on my 4th round of 100 days in a row, definitely worked. The purpose for potential employers was to show them exactly what I was doing every day. I wanted to be able to have a way to prove how hard I've been working and show people what I've learned. I don't know if any potential employers have ever read it, but I think the idea itself makes sense. The purpose for aspiring developers was to give them a roadmap of how to get from zero to employed. I was able to get a job as a software developer within 10 months of starting my journey and received an offer within 7 months.

Over the next 2 weeks, I will have several entries like this one, where I plan to take the reader through my journey in a more concise version. If someone were to try to parse out my journey through reading all of the blog entries, they would have 365 entries to read, which doesn't seem reasonable. So, without further ado, let's start from the beginning. I've been pondering the idea of learning to code for many years, but I never knew how to start. I always thought I had to go through a bootcamp that would cost a lot more money and time than I had. I couldn't afford to be out of work for 3 to 6 months on top of paying around $10,000, but I didn't know any other way. When I first moved down to Florida in 2015, I planned on pursuing a career as a golf professional. I had been successful in this journey, but the initial idea of being a golf pro originated before my daughter was born; my thought process and priorities were much different. On June 26th, 2018, my daughter was born, and everything changed. All of a sudden, working on weekends and holidays didn't seem like something I wanted to do. That was valuable time spent with my daughter, and I was consistently missing out on her life. Beyond that, I had become unhappy and unfulfilled as a golf professional. It was not a mentally challenging job, and I felt really stagnant.

It was around the beginning of May in 2019 when I started thinking seriously about getting out of the business, but what would I do? Initially, my thoughts were to use my economics degree, so I started doing some research. I found a lot of jobs in the area of data analysis that required a degree along those lines, and after some more digging, I realized this was one of the most in-demand jobs in the world right now. After looking at the requirements for these jobs, I knew I would need some technical skills to accompany my degree to gain entry into this field, and it looked like specifically I would need some understanding of databases. It looked like mySQL was a common requirement, so I looked around to see if I could find a way to learn this on my own. I found a course on Treehouse covering mySQL, so I decided to give it a try. It was a 25 hour course and I had a week's free trial with the website, so I set to work. Within a week, I had powered through this course. I realized two things in this experiment: one is that coding wasn't nearly as scary as I thought it would be, and two was that I could learn this online, on my own. I didn't know where to go after this, though. I knew I wasn't ready to apply for jobs after taking one course, but what would I learn next? I will continue where I left off here in the next part of this blog, coming soon.

Until tomorrow!