Just keep coding

#codenewbie #impostersyndrome #productivity #patience

I'm Nervous

Hello Everyone. My name is Joshua Covington and I've been a Software Engineer for a year now. This is my first post, so thank you all for taking the time to read what I have to say. I told myself that I would start jotting down my thoughts, so here I go.

Starting The Journey

Before I got 100% serious about my journey as a developer I was consistently on and off with my production towards accomplishing my goals. There were a lot of courses I watched on YouTube. There were a lot of subscriptions to various open source learning programs like CodeAcademy for example. I also have a load of courses on Udemy that I still to this day have not completed. I just could not figure out what I wanted to do. I wanted to know it all.

With that being said, I started somewhere. Yes I was all over the place trying to learn different languages and frameworks to see what I feel most comfortable with and I think it took me getting my first break as an engineer with the company I'm with now to focus on one language until I got it down packed.

The Switch

I started off as a Network Engineer II because that was the extend of my experience while I was serving in the US Army. As a Network Engineer I wanted to automate small tasks like backing up my switch/router configs every month or run scripts to troubleshoot various things. What better language to do that with?... Of course Python.

The company I am employed by had a pathways program for their employees to step into a realm that they had interest in. I loved being a Network Engineer, but I saw where the job market was going and decided to switch to Software Engineering and luckily the program needed a young engineer with some Python experience.

Finally Finding My Happy Place

For the past year in this position I've developed in Python and its been great. There are a lot of things I still have yet to learn, but over this past year being thrown into the fire I've learned a lot.

With programming in Python I started to pick up Django. The best decision of my life to be honest. I love everything Django has to offer. I know there are fans out there of Django and others who prefer other frameworks. While working on my masters one of my courses caused me to dive even deeper with finishing solutions to very detailed projects that we have to turn in.

Moral Of The Story

With telling a small snippet of my story and where I am today, I am saying all of this to say... Just Keep Coding...

Yes, for the senior developers who may have better things to say than I do... Just hear me out. If someone was to ask me what language or framework they should learn, I would tell them to experiment. I was all over the place until an opportunity knocked me inline with the language/Framework that was comfortable for me to learn.

I was stressed out, frustrated and was fed up with trying to pursue this dream that I thought I wasn't good enough for. Just keep coding... You will find that language/framework you enjoy learning and it will come naturally. Things take time for folks like me who wasn't born with the brain of a computer science major (no disrespect).