DEV Community

Officialdougb
Officialdougb

Posted on

Starting a new road

The story bits:

After 16 years in sales I left the profession. I'd learned a ton about communication, teamwork, problem-solving especially with solutions-focused processes, and learning quickly.
I decided to use those skills to pursue more passionate interests. That's where web development comes in.

From a young age I loved playing video games, then as a teen I learned how to make websites with simple html, and later css, followed by javascript. Then I went into the sales profession seeking the highest pay for the lowest barrier of entry. I certainly found what I sought. However, I never completely gave up on websites. A couple businesses I started began as website ideas. Over time with every business becoming a technology company, I slowly learned this and that.

Then after 16+ years as a sales professional in real estate and franchise investments, I began learning fast the ways of programming in Python, Javascript in depth, NodeJS, and learning libraries like React and other tools such as Bootstrap and Tailwind. Now I'm ready for a career move after 3 years of study and practice.


The step-by-step bits:

My career change has followed this intentional process:

  • make a list of criteria important to me in my next career (ex. personal passion, indoors, work-life balance for my family, etc)
  • identify possible jobs/roles fitting most of the criteria
  • identify skills to develop to meet minimum viable skillset for getting hired
  • learn the skills
  • build portfolio and profiles (ex. blog posts on dev.to, profile build-out on GitHub, etc)
  • get job.... ....i'm building my github and working on getting a job.

I hope this helps you if you're considering or at some stage in changing careers. Cheers!

Sentry blog image

How to reduce TTFB

In the past few years in the web dev world, we’ve seen a significant push towards rendering our websites on the server. Doing so is better for SEO and performs better on low-powered devices, but one thing we had to sacrifice is TTFB.

In this article, we’ll see how we can identify what makes our TTFB high so we can fix it.

Read more

Top comments (0)

The best way to debug slow web pages cover image

The best way to debug slow web pages

Tools like Page Speed Insights and Google Lighthouse are great for providing advice for front end performance issues. But what these tools can’t do, is evaluate performance across your entire stack of distributed services and applications.

Watch video

👋 Kindness is contagious

Please leave a ❤️ or a friendly comment on this post if you found it helpful!

Okay