The Beginning
July 07, 2018
Well, blogging wasn’t something I ever thought I would do, but I want to try to capture my progress as I am transitioning from working in tech support to working as a web developer.
I have been working for my company for just over 2 years now in tech support. I have done some scripting in VBS/VBA and python. I’ve written some overstretched SQL queries and scripts. But this is a whole new ball game. The last time I did any “web development” I was 15 and had just learned that Myspace let you embed CSS in your page.
I turned that interest into taking 2 semesters of HTML and CSS classes in high school and then into working for a mom and pop shop as their “webmaster.” I really just cleaned up the front-end and did data entry to maintain prices and postings on their e-commerce site through some huge hosting service. It was very little coding, unless you count the macros I used so I didn’t have to type “4.99” for every color of a long-sleeve shirt on the site.
I enjoyed the work and then forgot about it. I went to school and adamantly wanted anything with engineering at the end of it. But at the time I didn’t want to put in the work to earn that. So I switched to something easier, but still useful. During my extended stay at college I interned with my current company writing VBscripts to generate SQL queries to update a very old web project of theirs. Something about this summer made me question if this was something I wanted to do. I think it was working as a one-man-team on a product that I think everyone knew wasn’t going to take off. I worked under a manager who was very good at the people things, but had no experience in development of any kind and I wasn’t able to find a good mentor on this front. Either way, I finished my internship, graduated and went to work for the same company in any capacity they would take me. I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do, but they are a positive environment with decent pay and good people. I can’t ask for better than that.
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About a year ago now, I started to realize I hadn’t really given programming the shot it deserved and I started to take on more scripting projects again and became the SQL guru in support. I found all of this quite rewarding. So I bought some online courses and started to practice coding again. I started with iOS since the environment was appealing to me. It seemed as good a way as any to start practicing again.
During this time I began talking with some people in the company about my direction and what I wanted and the more we talked the more web development seemed a wiser choice. Our iOS team is quite well staffed and has a good range of experience levels. So I switched to something marketed as a “Web Development Bootcamp.” It walked me through how HTML worked again, how CSS has changed since I last used it. It introduced me to the DOM and jQuery. Then it was time to move on to an actual standalone hosted application. This was quite intimidating for me.
Over the next roughly 6 months I spent most nights after work and some mornings coding. Getting my feet back under me on how to learn these kinds of processes and practices. It has been a fantastic journey so far.
Which brings me to today. Last night I finished my first “large” project. I built, with a LOT of help, a fully functioning web app in Nodejs with express and mongodb backend. It has logins and comments and full CRUD on all the features. I am quite proud of it.
That’s why I decided to start this. I wish I was able to go back and read what I was proud of when I started this journey so I could gain some perspective. So this is my second best time to plant a tree start a blog.
I am going to set a personal goal to post on here at least weekly as I continue to learn and start to move into my new role. I honestly hope I am the only person to ever read this, but it somehow felt weirder to just keep this in a text file on my hard drive somewhere.
