My name is Sam Bracley C. Haitian passionate about a list of things, mainly coding, biology, and fashion illustration. I am majoring in bioengineering, a field that allowed me to dive into some of the things my attention particularly aroused around and notions that I have a slight interest in, which will also help me on this long journey.
How did I start?
The way that I have gotten into coding might be the craziest stories you will ever read today, and if your life is as dull as mine, the story will end up being one of the best stories you will ever read (just kidding).
An anecdote you should be aware of at the beginning is I was never nerdy, the geeky guy with the glasses who has the answer to every question you might have thought of back in middle school.
I became the nerdy guy. At some point, I opened myself to the world around me when I tried to figure out something I was willing to do for the rest of my life. That is how I became into technology, biology, and all that good stuff over time with passion, patience, and dedication.
On a boring Friday night when I was still in my homeland five years ago, I received a call from one of my best friends. Little man was excited as a kernel hull busting down on a hot frying pan while being loud as my mama yelling at me on a Sunday morning to try to get me out of the house for Sunday mass. He was really into the moment and tried everything he could to share his emotions with me.
In an instant, I was upset and sick of not getting in as he was, annoyed by his voice going in and out due to poor internet connection, piquing about nothing and everything, all at the same time.
After spelling out his excitement and understanding the mood or feelings are not shared, he stopped and went straight to the point by telling me the reason for such joy because living in Haiti at the time should be that funny and exciting.
The Journey
After closely paying attention to the information he divulged, I slowly started to pick the mood. It was high school at the time, and the rule was you either make the trend, or you follow a trend, and everybody knew making the trend where all the fame was, so I ended up for the first time thinking about it. Me, the quiet and loud, on occasion funny kid making the trend in the hallway. The thoughts were huge.
He talked to me about something called coding. I did know what it was but have yet to get interested in it for a list of reasons. But something was different from what he was telling me.
Although I knew the list of issues with me starting coding at the time, the thoughts and feelings of me doing it as we planned were just enough to start. During the call, we ended up choosing JAVA as a starting point.
Soon, we had to face those things we were trying to forget and get away from. One of them was a laptop or computer. It was back in 2018, and YES, I did not have a laptop. My family had a computer running Windows 7 in my dad’s office, but I could not use the latter due to constant power blackouts.
All the odds were at my side, but funny enough, I had a phone at the time I used to charge at my school or home whenever it was possible. Well, search after search, using my little brain while testing thousands of theories animated by fear and anxiety, I came upon HTML. Lord only knows how happy I was when I discovered I could use my phone to start HTML. I was all over the place. Jumping, yelling and celebrating what was, at the time, one of my most significant accomplishments, even though it did not have anything to do with me.
Time passed, and I downloaded a weird application that looked like Microsoft word, but they called EDITOR on my phone and started to get the work done.
It was easy, though. My mindset and the personal projects I had planned before starting learning helped and motivated me throughout the process.
After 1 or 2 months, we switched to JavaScript. That is where the problem started to arise.
One notion I was not able to grasp was functions. For some unknown reason, learning a function is, was easy. I could have written a whole book about it even though you could have summarized it in 2 lines. To show you what my understanding of the latter was. But making a function and using it was where everything suddenly became complicated.
One day I finally grasped it and eventually moved on to other topics.
I kept learning all over the internet, from YouTubers to YouTubers, books to books. I used to come to class just for attendance and buy myself a complete set of notebooks to write code on any course.
We were really into it and devoted ourselves to learning everything that could help us realize the projects we wanted. The same passion and dedication lead us to discover a list of technology we do not even use nowadays on our projects. A common soul would have said such a waste of time, but the understanding was all that mattered to us on the journey.
Five years later, we are still learning. We ended up being certified by more than 40 institutions. We worked on a list of projects and started to tutor people in the field we were interested in.
I have no idea how my life could have ended up going if I did not take that call on this boring Friday and was sick of that man’s excitement. That was one manifestation of what everyone has a unique name for; chance, randomness, blessings.
But through all these elements listed below, it is a blessing that shaped my life, which I will forever be grateful for.
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Top comments (1)
Loved reading your story Sam, thanks so much for sharing :D
I especially like your final comments on your early experience being a manifestation of chance and how it's a blessing that shaped your life as I have a very similar experience and I think about that a lot
Had I missed or not responded to this one random email I received 2 years ago my life would have taken a wildly different direction and I really do see it as just a chance blessing that kickstarted my career