My First Stack Wasn’t Even a Stack

My first stack wasn’t even a stack.

It wasn’t even mine.

It belonged to an elementary school.

Somewhere around 1979 or 1980, I was in the SPARK program (Seeking Purposeful, Analytic, Realistic Knowledge) for gifted students. That’s where I first encountered what many older developers will immediately recognize.

A TRS-80.

Programming in BASIC.

No hard drive.

No floppy drive.

A cassette tape.

Yes, tape.

I wanted to learn everything I could about it, but computer time was limited, and there was no chance we could afford a computer at home.

Years later, I had another brief encounter with an updated TRS-80 in high school. Computer Literacy had finally made it into the curriculum — but the class was split with Business Law, so keyboard time was still measured in minutes instead of hours.

Then life happened.

I didn’t have regular access to a personal computer until 1996, after my wife and I got together.

My First Paid Development Job

By 2002, I’d learned enough HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — the “core three” of the web at the time — to build a small website for my wife’s uncle.

It was my first (and only) paid development job.

The flat-rate payment was nearly double what I normally made in a week, and I happened to be unemployed at the time.

Of course I accepted.

Then reality arrived.

I spent two or three days fighting WYSIWYG editors and Microsoft Word, trying to stop them from “helping” me by rewriting perfectly good HTML.

Eventually I gave up.

I opened Notepad.

Everything suddenly became easier.

The website finally worked.

The Internet Archive still has a copy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021210054808/http://ticd.info/

Looking back now, it’s incredibly simple.

Back then, though, it represented something important.

Someone trusted me enough to pay me to build software.

The Hard Lesson

That project stressed me out more than I can adequately describe.

People often talk about imposter syndrome.

This wasn’t that.

I simply wasn’t ready.

If a small website required several days of wrestling with my tools before I could even begin solving the real problem, there was no way I was prepared to build software professionally.

That realization stayed with me.

I didn’t have a computer science degree.

There were no YouTube tutorials.

No AI assistants.

No affordable online bootcamps.

Mostly there were books I could afford, documentation I could find, and viewing the source code of websites I admired.

Twenty Years of Learning

In 2017, I completed Rob Percival’s Web Developer Bootcamp on Udemy.

I earned several SoloLearn certificates afterward.

They all taught me something.

None of them made me feel job-ready.

Then, during a layoff in 2024, I attacked learning with everything I had.

I made it through the first eight sections of Angela Yu’s Full Stack Web Development Bootcamp and completed the first three courses in IBM’s Full Stack JavaScript Developer Professional Certificate.

For twelve days, learning became my full-time job.

Then I was called back to work.

The momentum disappeared.

My Coursera funding ended before I could return.

Fortunately, I’d already purchased Angela Yu’s course.

So now I’m starting again.

But this time with a different philosophy.

Build. Audit. Fix. Ship.

I’m no longer trying to finish courses.

I’m trying to build software.

Learn enough to create something useful.

Build a real project — not another tutorial clone.

Test it.

If it’s broken, audit it.

Fix it.

Test it again.

Document everything.

Ship it.

Then repeat.

Every project should leave my local machine only after I’ve made every reasonable effort to ensure it works.

Not because perfection exists.

Because professionalism does.

Why It Matters

I’m trying to transition into software development after spending more than two decades working as a boilermaker.

When that transition finally happens, there won’t be a manager standing between me and the quality of my work.

There won’t be a committee.

There won’t be a supervisor.

There will only be clients.

As a solo developer, there’s nowhere to hide.

Either the software works, or it doesn’t.

Either the client trusts you enough to come back, or they don’t.

Without clients, software development is just a hobby.

And hobbies don’t pay the car note.

That’s why this time feels different.

I’m not just learning to code anymore.

I’m learning to deliver.

My first stack wasn’t even a stack. It was a TRS-80 with a cassette drive. Forty-six years later, I’m still learning—but now I’m learning with one goal in mind: to deliver software people can trust.