I definitely took a long and non-traditional route.
Read both C and C++ for Dummies books in my teenage years. I got stuck on the idea of pointers and references. Bailed on it.
Started college in 2000 while working as a dental technician. Got married and started a family, bailed on college (eventually got a worthless degree in General Studies in 2010), and turned my dental tech. job into an unintentional career.
2004, while playing a lot of Diablo II with my brother-in-law, I was looking up some info on the game. Got the crazy idea of thinking it would be cool to learn how to build websites, and started searching for tutorials online. Made my first website with table layouts in XHTML (a couple years passed before I learned about CSS). It was a terrible site but I had so much fun learning and building it.
Web development was on again/off again until 2014. In those 10 years, I learned HTML5, CSS, PHP, MySQL, JS (which I didn't use much and quickly forgot), and jQuery (same issue as vanilla JS). Built maybe a site a year during that time.
2014, I decided I had had enough with the dental tech. career. I got really introspective and figured out why I stuck with it for as long as I did (basically came down to it was stable and I was good at it), and that wasn't good enough. It was time to chase my childhood dream of programming (technically, game development at Nintendo, but I learned a lot over the years and decided against that specific direction). I joined a Meetup group of Ruby developers (it was the only developer group near me). At the first meeting I attended, someone gave a presentation on JS and Ember. I decided I should probably learn JS (up to that point, I focused mostly on the back end). I spent the next 6 months diving deep into JS and learning it by remaking an NES game (Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior) - this part is another story altogether that I might write about some day. I also learned Java and did some Android development during all this.
2015, I ended up finding a fully remote job doing both Android and WordPress development, and jumped on it. It was bittersweet leaving the dental lab I worked at for the previous 5 years, but that was my career-changing opportunity, so I ran with it.
That company fell apart 9 months later. I found another job 3 months later that was in the eLearning space. I helped build a ton of WordPress plugins and customizations for the platform. I worked there for 4 and a half years, while doing some freelance work here and there, and taught coding as I found people who were interested in it (including a couple co-workers, one of which ended up going from design to development).
My current role is lead developer at a company that does online auctions/fundraising for non-profit organizations. The funny thing is they found me at a coffee shop with code on my screen and me wearing a DEV t-shirt, so they figured I was a developer and they were looking for one. After talking with them, I ended up doing freelance work for about a year, then came on full time in mid-2020.
Looking back on this, I should probably write a full post on my journey. 😅
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I definitely took a long and non-traditional route.
Looking back on this, I should probably write a full post on my journey. 😅