DEV Community

Jonathan Grabowski
Jonathan Grabowski

Posted on

Welcome to my Blog!

Hello and welcome to my inaugural blog post! I’m going to be honest, I’ve never really had a great relationship with writing and certainly never thought I would start my own blog. I really enjoy reading and love to appreciate the written word of others, but I’ve always struggled to find my own voice with it. Most attempts result in hours of staring at the same few sentences, mulling over phrasing and questioning which direction to go in (much like I’m currently doing, lol). I’m hoping this blog can serve as a kind of training ground for me to practice my writing while simultaneously providing an outlet to discuss something that I’ve recently taken a huge interest in; software development and tech!

Full disclosure, I’m a total coding newbie. I’ve just finished my fourth week of a software engineering bootcamp and I had very minimal exposure to coding before starting the program. Prior to making this career shift I was working, very unhappily, as an accountant. I’m not here to speak badly of accounting as a profession, but it was certainly not for me. I felt that my professional routine had become too cyclical. Similar reports, filings, and data entry month after month. I found myself becoming very disengaged from my work and wanted to find something that sparked my interest more intensely. After speaking with some friends who had transitioned into the tech industry later in life, I felt that software engineering might be a great fit. The work sounded thought provoking and deeply engaging, having to apply logical methods for solving problems or building new features. I took a basic Intro to Python course on Codecademy and I was hooked!

After deciding that this was to be my new path, I enrolled in the Flatiron School software engineering bootcamp. To say that starting this program felt like diving into the deep end would be an absolute understatement. The pace at which we’re learning is intense! Luckily, I have some really great instructors and classmates who have made this seemingly impossible amount of information digestible. While the feeling of being overwhelmed by information can be pretty uncomfortable, those moments of clarity when a new idea or concept finally clicks are so rewarding and exciting!

That’s what I’d like to express and share with this blog, the conceptual breakthroughs that have helped me along the way in my journey to becoming a software engineer. So far in just the first few weeks we’ve dove into HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a bit of React. I’m honestly rather shocked at how much I’ve learned and retained in just a few weeks. In this blog I’ll attempt to chronicle some of the revelations I’ve had that have helped me along the way. Hopefully they will help you out as well! With that, my next blog post will be discussing the usefulness of my new best friend… console.log()!

Top comments (0)