Rabbits!

I was always an inquisitive person. In a room full of people, I’m the person observing the person that is observing other people. My younger brother would always take things apart - toys, electronics, those kinds of things - and always managed to figure out how to put those things back together. Then when no one is looking I’ll go and do what I saw my brother doing.

So behind closed doors I would always tinker with things too. The difference between myself and my younger brother is that the majority of the time I wouldn’t know how to put those things back together. When mom got mad, I’d say, “he did it”.

I mention all of that to illustrate my natural curiosity with things - how they work, what makes them tick. I remember one particular world being so appealing and new to me - programming, writing lines of code. I blame MySpace. While people were busy going back and forth about why they’re not on somebody’s top 8, I was busy trying to figure out how people were getting glitter, DC, Marvel backgrounds and other things on their profiles.

I could have just been experiencing FOMO, all I know is some intense curiosity sparked and I needed to learn how to do what they’re doing. I can’t remember but knowing me I probably googled, “myspace edit” or “customize myspace” and now I’m seeing things like; code snippets and tutorials for your profile header, etcetera. Among those, I’m seeing terms like, “html”, “css”, “href”. Now I’m googly eyed, looking at all this - asking, “what is all of this?”.

Rabbits! If you’ve ever watched them scurry off, they zig-zag, and pretty swiftly. I was doing that, but on Google. W3Schools, Codecademy, freeCodeCamp, edabit, udemy, courses on Youtube - I started on all of them! Anything that mentioned HTML or CSS, I bookmarked. In fact, the bookmarks are all still there, in my favourites folder, on the bookmarks bar.

W3Schools is the one I started with. Instead of jumping from one resource to another, I decided to try and stick with them. I remember going through their HTML and CSS courses multiple times, intermittently. Also went through their PHP course because I later got introduced to Wordpress. I wasn’t learning these things efficiently, I was excited that I was learning them though.

How do I know that I loved it? It quickly got to a point that anytime I sat down to learn more about this world - especially on days that I was not working, maybe snubbing my responsibilities - I would be at the computer literally all day, and late into the night. I would be on one resource, it would mention another technology or language I’ve not heard about and now I’m dropping what I’m doing and taking off to go learn more about the new thing that was just mentioned.

There is always something new to learn and I think that is part of what makes this stuff exciting. There is no such thing as repetition here. It’s like you’re constantly putting together a puzzle. There are so many different ways to solve one problem. Learning to code is like unlocking a superpower. I’ve tried Wix, I’ve tried Squarespace and even as powerful as Wordpress is - knowing how to code, knowing how things work behind the scenes, even just knowing the fundamentals, unlocks a world of total creative freedom. You can’t tell me that’s not awesome. We’ve not even mentioned the number of things being created now, and the things that have yet to be created.

I’ve matured a little bit, in all my “rabbit hole’ing”. And it’s led me to places like NEIT in Rhode Island, where I went to get my Associates in Web Design, then later, Lambda School, an online, Full-Stack Web Development + Computer Science bootcamp that I just graduated from. And then Career Karma who I now work for part-time, coaching and mentoring others whose curiosity for tech have also been sparked. And now wanting to make a career out of learning to code, learning technology - applying to jobs for what would potentially be my first Software Engineering role.

Thanks for reading, pray for me, wish me luck, don't give up.