Why I Decided To Study Software Engineering.
In general, the decision to start Developing was born out of curiosity, and a greater need to help people through what they use everyday, technology.
By trade and career I’m an Actor. I don’t know if you’ve ever waited tables or tended bar between productions just to get by…but it can get really old, very fast. At this point in time in my life I decided to make a change. I was offered a position at an IT Recruiting Firm in Philadelphia. I thought I hit the jackpot, I got to work during the day, I had holidays off to go see my family, I had weekends to myself, and eventually benefits. I started on a Monday. The month: January. The year: 2020. What could go wrong…? Don’t misinterpret what I’m about to say, I liked my job as a Recruiter, but I LOVED what the Developers were doing. Everything they built was so fascinating. That’s when my curiosity kicked in. How can people and machines do this?
Eventually we were catapulted into a worldwide pandemic and within the next three months of me starting my new position as a Recruiter I was unfortunately resourced. When your job is to find Developers to hire and no one is hiring. It’s kind of hard to do your job. I was out of options just like so many others.
I was sitting at the computer one day poking around and my curiosity came knocking. What makes Developing so interesting? What do these people build that makes the internet so dynamic? Why was there such a demand for companies to hire Developers who write in this language, or knowledge of this framework, etc. Luckily, there was a flash sale on a site called Udemy, there was a Front-End Web Developer course. I thought “What do I have to lose?” And that was it. I was hooked.
Within two weeks I was creating landing pages for fake startups, I was building games in JavaScript, and was just about to build my first website. Suddenly my phone rang. It was my grandfather, he unfortunately got hacked and thought that someone had placed a virus on his computer. I quickly dropped everything, rushed over, unplugged the Wi-Fi, and took a huge deep breath for both of us. Since the pandemic was raging out of control at this point no one could make a house call to fix his computer. So I quickly got on the phone with the Geek Squad, and it was at this point in time that I was introduced to the Backend of Developing.
The IT employee on the other end of phone had me typing in all sorts of commands in the terminal, and downloading different software, it was all happening so fast, I wanted to get my grandfathers computer fixed but I had SO many questions. Long story short, he’s fine, his computer is fine, but I was left flabbergasted.
It was then that I decided this is what I want to do. I could be as creative as I wanted to be with developing websites, but I also could help people that need it. I see so many users get frustrated with apps, or websites, or the user interface, that if I could obtain the knowledge to help them, I would.
And here we are.
