My name is Charlie Hoer and I am starting this blog to document my coding journey. So I guess I'll start with my story.
Where to start, 2003 seems like a good place. In 2003 I was a high school graduate with an A+ scholarship and dreams of becoming an engineer, but I test in to the lowest math class St. Charles Community College offered. Along with the huge math hurdle to overcome I found the classes boring. So I switched to a business major, but it was the same. I took a few more classes until my scholarship ran out. Then I tried my hand at finding a career with little success and after a few more years I decided to return to college. After meeting with the career counselors and taking a few test I landed on graphic design, which was a much better fit. And this my friends is where I would eventually be introduced to coding.
Now my initial exposer to web-design was not great. for an idea on time I believe this was around 2008 in my first round of graphic design school. My professor was burnt out and taught an outdated way of creating web sites called the photoshop method. It was almost no coding, you laid the site out in photoshop then sliced it into separate sections then exported them to dreamweaver, I don't remember learning anything about code and was not impressed with it. So I chose a print based design path. And graduated in 2009.
Armed with my new degree and some help from a few friends I struck back out into the world to procure a career as a graphic designer. Got a job designing for a print shop, bought a house and had my girlfriend move in. A few months later we found out she was pregnant and things seemed to going in the right direction, until. She was about 6 months along I go in to work one morning and was let go for lack of work. Now with a son on the way a wedding coming up and bills to pay I took the first job that came a long, which was as a delivery driver. Which I thought would just be temporary til my freelancing took off, but I am still there 9 years later.
After a few years of hit or miss freelance work I decided my skills needed a brush up and again I returned to school. This time something magic happened I was exposed to coding websites! It combined everything I loved learning, creativity, problem solving, bringing my web layout to life. It was one giant ever changing puzzle to solve and I was hooked. Now its 2016 I am still in my low paying full time job married with 2 kids so money is tight so I went the Codecademy route. true to form though there were set backs and issues to deal with so I got lax on my learning.
Which pretty much brings us to the present, today is November 7, 2021. I am currently 15% of the way through the front-end engineer career path on Codecademy pro. I will be at 100% by July 4, 2022. I am creating this blog not only for me but in hopes it might help someone else with a similar situation and for my sons so one day they might know how hard I worked to give them the best life I possibly could.
And with that rather long introduction out of the way LET THE JOURNY BEGIN!
Top comments (0)