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Emmanuel Duchene
Emmanuel Duchene

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13 years, and welcome to The Nerd Heap!

13 years. One might even add thirteen long years. This is what it took me, Emmanuel, 35, living in Eskilstuna, Sweden, to realize teaching middle school English and French was not for me anymore. The reasons are many and I won't elaborate on them but let's say teaching teenagers thirteen years ago was not the same as teaching them now.

Well, actually, this is a lie. It took less than thirteen years to have this epiphany decide it was enough and time had come to do something else with my life had come.

What to do was pretty obvious, I like computers, always have, even though I got my first one quite late, at age 15, during the golden age of AIM and MSN messenger. I was pretty active on Myspace (RIP) too, convinced I was actually interacting with actual celebrities who'd spend their time talking to strangers and listening to my music.

I have been hobby programming for a few years and it seems like something that suits me well. So, I found this .NET software engineer degree at a local university of applied science, Campus Nyköping. The timing was great as my parental leave was coming to an end, last winter. I applied, with high hopes of getting in. It's something I hade been thinking about for a few years but without really taking the jump. Now was the right time and I received support from my wife, who, let's be honest probably had enough, herself, of hearing me say how much I hated my job. I applied for many similar degrees but this one was the one I wanted. It is local, designed in partnership with local IT companies crying for .NET developers. Two internship periods during the two year studies, hopefully one foot in already at the end of it. The chances of landing a job are high.

So I went back to work, for a few months because I had to, and in June, I received an e-mail: I was in!

It's now been over a month and I cruise at full speed towards becoming a .NET developer.

So, anyway. All this to say I'll be posting about my "journey" (don't you hate it when people talk about their life changes as journeys? I certainly do), the challenges of software development on my patience, my achievements ("YES!! the console prints prime numbers!"), deceptions, doubts AND random nerd stuff no one ever told you about in school.

Welcome to The Nerd Heap!

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