I’m going to start this post by telling you a little background story of mine.
I’ve been teaching and coding for almost the same time, I mean, I graduated in 2013 and got hired in the public education system by March 2014 and a few months later, by November 2014, I started feeling “prepared” to build very basic websites using plain HTML/CSS and a little JavaScript thanks to W3Schools and MDN, so I started promoting myself locally as a website designer/developer without success. Kept trying and by January 2015 I sold my first ever website for less than $50 to a local drugstore, yes, ugly as fuck, hahaha, but, that’s how it all started.
All this time, I’ve been trying to change careers, since I really love and enjoy working in IT, and, even though I have landed a few jobs as software developer, I haven’t fully switch roles and haven’t able to change career, so coding is just half-and-half hobby and side hustle to me.
Now, the important part here, is that I have been building myself for the last 10+ years in terms of knowledge, professionalism, and practical skills, because, of course, being raised in a rural town, with no access to computers and internet as a child, and attending Dominican Republic’s public school translates in a poor education and lack-of-substance intellectual development, which is basically the reason now I had to take time to actually learn mathematics, Spanish grammar (yes, I know what you’re probably thinking right now, and, indeed, I was raised in a Spanish-speaking country, without a proper education in my own native language, hopefully I was the only one), personal development and IT.
Actually, to me, it is hilarious how things worked out for me, for example, I didn’t even know what personal/professional development was about until 2020, during COVID. At that time, I made the decision to actively work in my personal development, starting by learning something new every week and building something every month. Started building projects and following JS30 and #100DaysOfCoding challenges and many others that didn’t take me anywhere due to lack of discipline.
So, after a few years of failing at every goal, I decided to build discipline instead of staying in the tutorial hell and the never ending learning new tech circle. So, I drastically switched the content I was consuming for inspiring people that don’t talk about motivation but consistency and discipline, started working on myself, like, for real. I’m talking about finishing books, reading more, writing code, learning methodology and architecture, not only shining new tech, even attended courses on education, my main field, and, more or less, having ups and downs, now I feel I am pursuing not a goal but growth.
So, my final thoughts will be these four statements:
- Life’s short, make a plan to take back the control of it
- Knowing a lot of languages and libraries won’t make you a great developer
- You do have time, just write down a schedule
- It’ll be sad if you don’t enjoy life, so, make sure you set aside time for that too