Looking back at the past few years and comparing what the world was like, and, what "getting a job in programming" meant for me, I consider myself a fool, don't be like myself.
almost three years ago, I decided what I want to do to make a living for the rest of my life. I was 16 approaching 17, now, I'm 19 approaching 20. Programming was and still is the major passion of mine side by side with music.
Ever since I was 9 years old I dreamed of making my dream open-world game. I drifted and explored many other fields while growing up, I tried working at a restaurant as a delivery boy, a kitchen staff, and a waiter (that was possible for me as a teenager because I lived in a very poor country and there was nothing such as a law that prevents Child labor or maybe there was but it was not applied in real life.)
Anyways, I hopped between supermarket Jobs, restaurant, and learning how to breakdance, eventually, I got back to my original dream "To make my dream game". I started playing with programming languages and game engines, I tried Unreal engine and Godot (Godot 3 & and UE4 were the latest versions of both). made a couple of platformer mini games, 5 to be specific, they all got a total of 100 downloads on itch.io - I will link my page down below - after seeing the reality of game making and how hard it is in the real world, I realized that no matter how passionate or how much do you love to create things and express your passion, you need to put in the work, time, and the a real boring plan if you really want to make it.
The thing that triggered me to write this mini article/story or whatever this is, is that, my realization back then intimidated me in the worst way possible, I stopped programming, my knowledge in Data structures and algorithms was already small, so it faded away after a year or so, my dream of becoming a real game developer and opening my own game studio suddenly was so far away.
In a year or so I got my General Certificate of Secondary Education with an overall 94.17% which meant in my country that I can enroll in a the best college of my country and study to become an I.T. I did. For a year, and then I reflected on my behaviors and immediately knew that I wasn't taking college seriously enough to actually learn something from it and that the quality of the education in my university wasn't the best and that I can get something better.
The goal at this point is to enroll in a better university and get my **** back together so I can get back to chasing my dreams. Ok. Got it. I looked up what I should have to enroll as an international student in a better university, luckily enough my GCSE qualify me and I don't need to take the SATs but what I needed was a language proficiency proof. I studied for 3 months and planned to travel to take the TOEFL August, 2022.
Unfortunately, I can't take the TOEFL in my home country and I need a visa to travel. The visa took 6-7 months to be issued regardless of other docs I needed to travel. So, I stopped studying for the TOEFL and every tip and technique that I learned were totally forgotten.
March,2023 I travel thinking that I can take the TOEFL right away and that once I settled I will schedule my TOEFL exam day and take it and that's it. Well, I took a mock up test and gave marks to myself following ETS rubrics. After the first mock up test I knew that I should re-plan and study and learn everything from the start again.
I am one of the few lucky people that did have the ability to stay out of their home country and have someone to back them up financially. I studied for 40 days all day and all night (yes, I didn't work). Took the test in May,2023 and got a pretty nice 87 out of 120.
I started applying to universities, and learning about what studying abroad means. I started thinking about work and paying my own bills. I can't rely on my people forever, in fact, I can't rely on them further than this year. which meant that I should find me a Job before new year's eve or somewhat around that time.
I spend the rest of May rebuilding my knowledge in Algorithms and Data structures and planning for future Tech interviews.
That leads us to June 2023, I started reading a book about Django, because I wanted to work with python and that I wanted to work a part time Job so I can focus on my university, and, web-dev part of the industry really offers that the most and the lowest entry barrier compared to other parts.
I got back to programming again. I'm still practicing DSA.
I already built around 10 tutorial mini projects. I'm building C.V Projects in Django, and I'm actually pretty passionate about a certain project and I'm working on developing it one step at a time. I made a promise to myself to never quit no matter how hard, boring, intimidating and challenging things get.
In my free time, I gathered many friends online to create my first game dev team and although we failed a game Jam and only made one demo in a span of 45 days, we are planning to get on another project in September for a Dungeon Crawler Jam.
And I'm posting about my progress once or twice a week ( regardless of this post ) I'll summarize what to take from this whole story about myself.
- Don't get intimidated by the unknown, discover it.
If I kept up sharpening my skills it would have been easy for me to get a real Job in web dev or maybe even better in game dev.
- Don't waste time, especially, if your are a 16-20 Y.O and trying to get into programming.
Good programming skills are the results of long practicing hours and experimentation with many different things, make it a part of your daily routine.
- Expectations accuracy depends on how real your plan is.
Ok, in the year or the year and a half that I took off programming I didn't actually stopped making things 100% I made a total of 10 projects that I sold for friends/local store owners/connections irl. But what my expectation missed was that, I won't always remember how to do everything that I have done once or twice before or during a period of time, also, that I can't get a visa in a day or two, a week or two or a month or two, it took me 6 months. So that makes the time delay of my plan nearly a year.
A year of my life was wasted. all because of unrealistic planning.
- Keep on pushing forward and be open-minded, always.
Pushing forward prevented me from making the time I wasted cross over 1 year. being open-minded helped me look at other choices and life plans that were not directly available or accepted by myself or my family.
Finally, sorry for any typos.
- my mini games
- music that I have created during the year I spent in college back home
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZXxvgwvoatw9vQXqH_7ejg
- A lovely playlist to listen to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VheJjtaE_fs
- My LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jawdat-tayfour-ba517a19b/
- My GitHub
https://github.com/Jawdat-Tayfour
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Thanks for reading
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