I used to work as a material engineer.
My first job was helping out with stainless steel stuff. Nothing glamorous. But that's where I started, handling materials, not code.
I found a payslip from that job last week, cleaning out my Google Drive. My first salary as a material engineer. I stared at it for a minute trying to remember what that person thought was going to happen next.
It wasn't a plan that got me here. It was a lot of smaller things bumping into each other.
The canvas problem
The decision to move into development didn't come from an epiphany. It came from a warehouse management software I used every day at the engineering job. At some point I started wondering how it worked. That was one piece.
But once I decided I wanted to be a developer, I had no idea where to start. No one to point me in a direction, just the internet and a thousand course creators with a thousand different opinions on the right approach.
It felt like being handed every painting tool in the world and told to paint. The paralysis of not starting because there might be a better approach. I know people say "just start." I find that annoying, not because it's wrong, but because it's obvious and still hard.
The path
I got lucky, a support engineer role opened up at a software company. I spent two years watching how features shipped, how bugs got fixed, how developers talked to each other. I learned MySQL. Wrote small scripts. Tried to get into a software engineering program by writing code on paper. I didn't get in.
Eventually the CTO gave me a shot and I got a developer role.
Then I started looking for other jobs and went off the rails for a while. I was learning Python because a listing looked interesting. Doing LeetCode questions that had nothing to do with my actual work. Applying for roles I had no experience for. Months of that. Eventually I stopped and went back to PHP.
I've written about this before, the "running before walking" part. For years it was just learning as fast as I could in whatever direction felt urgent. It mostly didn't work.
What it actually was
I just changed careers. It took six years and a lot of wrong turns, but that's roughly what it is.
What I have now that I didn't have before is a direction that doesn't feel like a sprint. A small startup, Laravel and Vue.js. For the first time I'm not learning to keep up. I'm just learning. My day-to-day has much less stress even though I still spend most evenings and weekends reading and writing code.
If you're in the middle of your own messy pivot, I don't have advice. I just know that the clean version of the story doesn't exist. Not mine, not yours. You just keep going until the thing you're doing starts to feel like the thing you should be doing.
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