My journey back into development

I started my journey originally in 2016. My first and only child was about to be born and at the time I was working at a factory for an uncle, manufacturing road cases for sound and lighting equipment. I still didn't have a clue what I wanted to do with my life but around this time was a good calling for me to continue my education. I had enrolled in the local college in my era and had to decide on a major. Computers have always been a big interest of mine. I enrolled with a major in computer science and this is when I found something that was interesting to me.
The curriculum for this degree started with how to build a website with HTML and CSS. From there it would take the turn to learn java. By the time I had finished the HTML CSS portion of the program, with a little bit of research, I knew I wanted to build websites, primarily on the front end. The curriculum I had in school turned away from the frontend and no longer interested me. I would spend my time in all my other classes studying the frontend with resources such as udemy.com, podcasts like syntax FM and various YouTube videos published by those like Brad Traversy and Tyler McGinnis. I was on a good track to landing my dream job, I'd wake up and be at work by 4 in the morning and off at 3 in the afternoon, head to school until about 9 at night, come home spend time with my family, put my baby to sleep, open up my computer and immerse myself in code.
Working a fulltime job, being a fulltime parent and attempting to pursue a degree in computer science was relatively hard. I felt as if I was learning more on my own and decided to drop out of college in order to utilize my time better for my personal studies and to allow more time with my family. Everyday I would spend 2-3 hours building projects and trying to stay current with the industry. I got stuck in what most will know as tutorial hell. I would try to build a project of my own and would draw blanks, of course I knew this would happen and that I would have to figure it out.
Life hits everybody hard at some point and around 2019 it did just that for me. I was met with a decision that would benefit my family financially but would take more of my time away. Living in an apartment at the time, barely making ends meet and trying to make a career change was challenging so I decided to take the job. I was now a production line supervisor working 14-16 hours a day, and what I did enjoy was problem solving in this position. I learned lean processes and operations, continuous flow, i learned to work smarter not harder and all of which i was learning i had heard about how i can utilize these in web development. Though at this time I had taken a break from coding, I never lost the interest. I was still staying current with best practices and new technologies. Then covid hit.
The covid pandemic was a major setback, not just for me but for a lot. My current job had shut down because it was not deemed essential and now I was out of work. I thought this was a perfect time to sharpen my skills and confirm the tools I had to break into the industry and I started to freelance, making websites for a few locally owned businesses. I wasn't making enough to pay the bills and knew I needed to find a job to get these paid. And just like that, I landed a job, and this is where I'm at at this very moment. It is June 2020 and I am now learning to be a plumber. The past year and a half I have learned so much, not just about plumbing, but about culture in a work environment, being part of a team to solve a multitude of problems, which is something I do on a daily basis. My employer knows that I enjoy working on the web and so oftentimes I get to meet with them to discuss innovations within the company. I pitched an idea to build a scheduling application where a service technician can assign helpers for specific times and days of the week and the schedule would automatically populate. This was a success and though not very appealing to the eye, it works and it is used to this day. Then it was back to the field for me, meeting with clients discussing their concerns and reverse engineering a plumbing disaster in order to rebuild it better, faster, and smarter.
I recently took a vacation and visited the beautiful island of Oahu, Hawaii. It was during my flight that I had a calling! The passenger sitting next to me pulled out his MacBook, and I don't tend to be nosey but I couldn't help noticing that he had VScode opened and he was hacking away. I didn't disturb him at this moment but I admired what he was doing. Three hours into the flight we struck up some small talk that quickly led me to ask about his journey. He told me how long he's been developing and the work life balance he has. I was given tips to get back and he believed wholeheartedly that I can do it, and I believe I can too.
What I am doing differently this time is documenting my journey and this is where it started. I need a little refresher and will get right back up on this bike. I plan on touching on HTML CSS and JS, building a website or two, then I will touch up my ReactJs skills, and recreate that same website using this library. All while doing this I will be doing Brad Traversy and Florin Pops 50 days 50 coding challenges. I am back on my grind and more passionate about this path than ever before. Hey, I may even start making YouTube videos of my journey or learnings, but I'll need to get over that camera shyness I got.