Stay curious, find fulfillment

Note: With the exception of a few edits, I originally posted this blog on Hashnode in January 2022.

When the pandemic hit the US in March 2020, I was laid off from my job in the restaurant industry and I just had a feeling that I wouldn't ever return. What was I gonna do though? I have a bachelor's degree and I've tried my hand at jobs in other fields, but I never found anything that really clicked (and also payed the bills). I actually really enjoyed working in restaurants, I love working with people and I like the dynamic environment. But with my own health in mind, as well as my family's, it just didn't seem like the best place for me any more.

I was unemployed for a while and uncertain of my next steps, like so many of us were. I ended up getting a certification to teach English as a Second Language. By March 2021, I was teaching English to kids in China from a makeshift desk in my kitchen. The hours were a little difficult to adjust to, but the money was good and I didn't have to be out in public. That was going great for a while, until we got the news that new regulations had been passed in China and the majority of ESL companies went under. I still had work lined up for the next 6 months, but after that my employment status was less certain. I realized I was kind of back to square one.

When I got this news, I was actually visiting my best friend in LA. He asked me if I'd ever thought about learning to code. I looked at him like he was crazy. NO. I had never thought about learning to code. In fact when I thought about people who code, I had a specific image in my mind, that just wasn't me (or was it? 😅). I didn't take him super seriously, but a seed had been planted.

A little while after that conversation, I got an email from a job recruiter. Back then I was signed up for alerts for miscellaneous "entry-level" jobs, not really knowing what else I should try for. This email was different though. It wasn't from LinkedIn, it was from some random person named Christopher Robins. And it wasn't a position in a call center or data entry, it was a position as a Front End WordPress Developer. I was like - how did you get my email?! This isn't the kind of job I look for... I'm not qualified to do anything remotely like web development.. But... then I went down the Google rabbit-hole. Could I get qualified to do this job? How long would it take? What would the pay-off be? A few clicks later and I had discovered freeCodeCamp. I was skeptical. Why was this free? Was there a catch? Was this site legit? I decided to just roll with it. That same day I started the Responsive Web Design certification and wrote my first lines of HTML. By the end of the week I was building my first projects!

When I started writing code and seeing what I could do, I was like wow! How did I never know about this?? This is totally a career for me! It combines all my favorite interests - language, logic, AND design - into one thing! And I could get a JOB doing this some day?! Wow! I tried not to get ahead of myself - which I always do - I told myself you just have to do this day by day and be patient. I thought, maybe by the end of the year (2021) I could do all of the FCC certifications and get a job. Hahaha. I didn't realize that was actually getting ahead of myself! (Each certification - there were 10 at the time - is 300 hours, give or take.) But I had finished the RWD certification pretty quickly (a couple of weeks, I want to say), and so I moved on to the JavaScript Algorithms and Data Structures Certification. I'll knock this out in a month, surely.

Oh... sh--enanigans! Well this was over my head. I was really boggled by these challenges and thought, maybe I'm not actually cut out for web development... 😔.

I didn't stop trying, but I was rattled. By that point I had already learned that a developer's best friend is Google, and that there is a wide world of blog posts and YouTube tutorials and web documentation, in addition to forums for students and mentors to talk shop. I was using these resources liberally, but the JS certification was still moving really slowly and I was getting frustrated.

I can't remember where I found out about Scrimba... Was it from a Google search, or did someone in a forum tell me about it? I found myself over on that learning platform, and decided to check out the Learn JavaScript for Free course. Instantly, I liked the interactive aspect - you are watching a screencast of an instructor teaching you JS methods and coding them on the screen. But then they have you pause the cast, and you can actually interact with the code! They challenge you to write things for yourself, to see how it all works. If you get it on your own - great, if not, you un-pause and the instructor shows you how they would do it.

That course was so cool. I liked hearing a teacher explain and at the same time demonstrate how JavaScript works. Seeing how to interact with the DOM and actually doing it myself clicked a lot more than what I was trying to do on FCC just from reading and trying to guess at what I was doing. I also liked that I was building actual projects from the jump. The first project was a passenger counter app. It already had a little styling on it, but I got to practice a little more CSS and also learn the JavaScript to get it working. The next one was a simple Blackjack game. That was fun! Finally, I built my first Chrome extension. What?! I built a Chrome extension?! So freakin cool.

When I got done with the free Scrimba course, I felt much more confident that I could learn JavaScript. I went back to freeCodeCamp, and I made a little more progress in that certification before stalling out again. Ugh. Dangit. I swear I'm going to finish it one day. (Edit: I did finish it, at the end of 2023.) I started looking around on Scrimba some more. They have a lot of free courses that are honestly really good. There were some that were only for Pro members, and then there was this "Frontend Developer Career Path." I thought, I'm already doing freeCodeCamp, and it's free but... at the same time, I've kind of reached a road block. I want to keep coding. I want to make this happen!

I decided that I had already gotten so much out of just one course on Scrimba, that I would go ahead and drop some coins to get a six-month Pro membership and do the Career Path. Best. Decision. Ever. It's all self-paced, and sometimes I would knock out a module in a couple of days, other times it would take me a few weeks. At the time this article was written, I was 70% of the way through it and feeling great. I looked back at where I had been a few months before that, and I could see how much my confidence had grown, the projects I had been able to build, the skills I had learned that I could put on a resume and possibly get hired. I didn't feel quite so bold as to apply for jobs just yet, but figured it was around the corner.

I know that I still have so much to learn (even now), and probably will never stop learning! There are so many different programming languages and frameworks out there, so it's really a matter of deciding which one to learn first. For me, part of the secret to a fulfilling life is to stay curious. Whether it is web development or another language on Duolingo, embroidery or auto mechanics, keep asking questions and solving problems, and enjoy where the journey takes you!