When a hero is born, they usually have some type of origin story. Mine, started a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... If you look from at it from the perspective of someone with a lifespan of a fly, that lives in a galaxy that isn't close to the Milky Way. But for any human, my story began several years ago at the cross roads to end of my college career. It was here that I was faced with the reality breaking question, of "what am I going to do after I graduate?". As a college senior, who had experienced various trials and tribulations throughout my collegiate experience, I had thought my road was paved and lead to a clear path, but I was mistaken.
As I pondered, my questions about the future grew larger and more uncertain as my graduation day approached. I started to wonder about whether the path of a Political Scientist was the correct path for me. My doubts led to me questioning myself, about what I really enjoyed in life. This is when I started to realize, that in my life of consistent change, the only thing that had really been consistent in it was my interest in playing gaming. As a child, I lived a life full of sudden change, and those sudden changes ended up being the norm for me. But no matter the change, I could always rely on my level 100 Charizard to be by my side.
Games, though they, may seem insignificant in the large scheme of things, were always there for me in hard times. In times, when I moved from one state to the other, these games kept me connected to friends of the past, while also introducing me to new ones as well. This bond that I had formed with gaming was one sided in my youth, in that though I had interest in games, that interest was solely towards the content of the games, and not about their creation or origin. Sure if you had asked as a child, how to beat a Bowser in Super Mario, or how to catch a legendary Pokemon, in Pokemon Red, I could give you an answer within minutes. But if you asked me anything about who created Pokemon, or how it was created, or more importantly what field of study you needed to be in, in order to recreate these games, I would be at a loss.
Looking back at my life and comparing it with today, I can truly marvel about how much life has changed in such a short amount of time. As a child, finding life changing information was not as simple as it seems like it is today, where you can google one phrase and be flooded with millions of responses within seconds. This being said, I was ignorant about things I cared about. But then, here I was a bajillion years late to the party, and once again in a life pickle, games came to my rescue. In my struggles to find my true life calling, I finally researched how games were created and I stumbled upon coding and software development as a result. And just like that a whole new world blossomed in front of me, but it seemed like I was too late to the party for it to matter.
Being flooded with so much new information, I was overwhelmed, but at the same time I was lucky. Around the time I started my search, was and still is a time, when tech companies were in dire search for more computer programers in this technologically booming time. Not only were there a growing number of coding bootcamps popping up, to help people move towards a career change toward these new medium, but there were also an increase in job opportunities as well. But the even bigger coincidence was that, I had a bigger connections to the computer programming world than I had realized, my sister was already a part of that world. My sister, walked me through and explained about what she knew about this strange world of coding to me, and with her help I started testing out the waters to see if they were the right temperature for me. Because of how accessible information is nowadays, she told me I should look up either YouTube tutorials, or look at some free websites for coding introductions. So I did, and at my first "Hello World" I knew I would be hooked for life. This new world of slowly understanding how gaming worked, "in real life", was truly mind blowing. But soon enough these video tutorials became too hard to follow and seemed a bit much for one gamer to handle so I asked my sister again for some advice on what to do. It was here that she told me to research about the world of coding bootcamps, or if I was really serious about it, to consider going back to school for a degree in Computer Science to follow in her footsteps. And it was here that I realized that I truly was about to become born anew.
Now as I am writing this section of the blog, I realize now that I ended up talking more about my past ignorance, rather than talking about my coding journey. But because of how complicated my coding journey was, its seems like a new story on its own, but I'll give you a story version here. I started my journey with YouTube tutorials about coding, the specific languages I studied were web development based, with the (HTML,CSS, JavaScript) trio. But this led to a seemingly large gap of information that I wanted to know, but with only videos felt like I couldn't acquire. Then I moved towards a newer approach with enrolling in a coding bootcamp, specifically the one offered by the University of Washington's Full Stack Developers bootcamp. It was shortly after completing that bootcamp that I still felt incomplete, and had a few more journeys(a coding "job", formal collegiate teaching) along the way. But that blog is coming up in the near future, because I'm on a new adventure learning more about coding, with my favorite Cohort in a bootcamp taught by FlatIron School.
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