That's a question that I get quite a lot.
My short answer is "it's fun!"
But for my long answer:
I've always been a tech person.
- Built my first computer when I was 15.
- Played a ton of games (and probably should have touched more grass and talked to more people).
- And I was the unofficial IT guy at the first Real Estate.
I had been trying to learn programming for the past 8 years. It was on and off, on and off. And to be quite frank with you, I half-arsed it.
But programming clicked for me back in July 2021.
At the end of each month, I was responsible for emailing the End-of-Month Rental Statements to our landlords. I would have to scan each statement individually, rename each PDF individually and then email each one individually.
All-in-all, this process took 5 hours each month.
I was able to build a small Node.js application which would allow me to batch send emails and have different attachments for the different owners.
With this I would have been able to reduce that time-frame to 1 hour a month.
It was then that I understood the why.
We're solving the problems of our users.
Software engineering is just a means to that end. And one that scales.
Since July 2021, I have:
- 968 hours in VS Code and
- 2963 commits on GitHub.
- Landed a handful of Small Open Source Contributions (4 or 5, looking forward to getting more)
And I have also been:
- Mentoring beginner programmers at Code.Sydney (a Volunteer Developer Organization)
- Posting every day on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/teeang/)
- Frequently going to Meetups
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