How I decided to change career and become a developer

I never thought I would end up being a developer. Even having computers around me since the start of the Millenium, I always looked to programming with skepticism. Computers until then were pure entertainment for me and my family. Oh, the glorious days playing my favorite playlist on Winamp while browsing ICanHasCheezburger or defeating an army of orcs at Warcraft II! Such nostalgia!

The graphic designer

I recall the internet in a moment where memes ain't even named memes. Instead, we had funny pictures. Uppercase white Impact font with a 1px solid black border and a jolly cat picture was the template to success.

I have found this picture at an NFT site. There were simpler times.

And with such knowledge here I was creating funny cat pictures on Photoshop for the Internet. Little did I know that I would end up land a graphic design job at a local small newspaper for having basic editing skills.

My graphic design experience never led to a bigger role in the company. I delivered for 7 years the newspaper demands and they were happy about it. And me too since the tasks were easy and I had plenty of free time to spend my young days and study for the Management bachelor's degree I was enrolled.

The teacher

One of the newspaper clients came to the office in the afternoon to check an ad I was responsible for designing. She was the director of a local English school and was looking for a new instructor. I had basic English knowledge at that time (one of my cat memes hit the hot page!) and I thought "why not?". I was invited to have a conversation about the role and then hired to be the new instructor!

The year was 2013 and the beginning of my teaching career. The kids enjoyed the clownish way I explained topics and I had a great and funny time with them.

My eyes opened to further markets and while I was not in the newspaper or at the school, I was studying to become a public school teacher. This led to my second degree (Licentiate Portuguese/English) and then an approval to work part-time in public service (union worker) in a nearby city.

The developer

Skip to 2020 and pandemics, classes now are online and I had to record youtube videos for my students explaining the book lessons.

It was around April 2021, on a sunny cold Saturday afternoon, browsing random Youtube content that a video appeared: "The Benefits Of Becoming a Web Developer" by Brad Traversy. I could be having fun with podcasts or fail videos but decided to give it a try. This one leads to another one about web development, another about HTML, CSS and Javascript. It was already Sunday and here I was setting up my first IDE.

I always had a thing for design and technology and those videos kinda suited the path. So decided to take the web developer roadmap, and from there dive into front-end skills. Half of my routine is now decided to learn programming while still teaching English to kids.

About eight months later, 2022 arrived and a big career change was made. Today, about a year later, I am dedicated full-time to approaching advanced concepts and frameworks, materializing personal projects with ease while improving my coding skills, better and better.

That's my motivation to learn how to scale websites and mobile apps, deliver suitable solutions and improve metrics, aiming to be a high-level developer.