Today I will talk about my journey into becoming a developer. I think it could be interesting as I am still young (21 y.o) and French, so you can get a glimpse of how it goes on this side of the world.

First contact

I figured out as many other devs that my first interaction with programming was Minecraft.

Around 15 y.o I discover Minecraft with this one friend who was in Deutsch class with me. He told me about computers and gaming in general and that's it, I was hooked. So before buying the actual Minecraft game I played it illegally (I bought it later, don't worry😉 ). You had different things to install in order to play it wiith your friends like Hamashi to create servers.

Slowly I became interested in the server plugins and started to learn how it worked and how I could tweak it in Java.

Programming wasn't option #1

As I grew up, I tried many things like Photoshop, C4D, blender and I thought to myself. "Yeah I like to create things I want to do it in the real world" and it translated to me wanting to become an engineer. I realize now that I was naive to think I would be this easy to become an engineer, because in France(and everywhere I guess) in order to become an engineer you have to be really good at Math, and a known thing is I wasn't. But I still went to the engineering section and found out it was not like I idealised it. I struggled for sure but I had this exploration class called ISN, which is basically computer science, and realized that I really like this. I want to do it more. The things that I did during this class where basic, but that hooked me. We had Python courses that to thought us string concatenation, for and while loops. In addition to that we had HTML & CSS class. We had to do a simple website project. I remember my website being ugly, but it was satisfying to see what I could do.

This led me to go into a D.U.T in Technology in Grenoble, which is 2 years in University.

French C.S University

It is the first time I have left my small city and started a new life in Grenoble. I had my own studio, made new friends and discovered new places to eat. Everything is great and class starts and we're introduced to a really old language : Ada. The only exploit he had was that he blew up a rocket because of an error in gas management.

Anyways, the classes are hard and I learn a lot of new concepts such as :

• Data structures
• Object Oriented Programming
• Polymorphism

If you are using Python or Javascript, this concept may be unfamiliar to you and it's it normal. It was really hard and I was ranked in the lower half, but anyways I tried my best to graduate and next semester was about Java and I manage to get better as It is a way better language to use and then the pandemic strikes. We were all at home.I manage to do better staying at home and I crunch the third semester which is all about developping a web appplication until the fourth comes and this semester is special because you have a 12 weeks internship.

Developer in a Startup

I started in a start-up which was helping athletes and trainers to identify the key performance indicators in order to reach their full potential. It was called Sporttesting and it was awesome.

It was a small business and we were mostly workings with sport structure and they were handing reports to the clients which were hand-crafted which as you can imagine very time consuming. I was the only developer at the time, so I could only rely on myself and the internet in case of problems. It was very a rewarding experience because as a developer it allows you to focus on a task, and when you overcame difficulties.

It became second nature. Hence the fact that there was no system or anything I had to come up with one which I developed using Javascript.It was basically a Single Page App(S.P.A) that was treating an excel and fill out a fancy report. After this internship I've been in a private school and still in the same company as it was pretty cool working at Sporttesting, and I had this project of building a Web application to allow our workflow to be more robust and getting the company to pivot to an (Service As A Software)SaaS company.

Sadly, the company ended up running out of business and I will soon start in a new company which I am very much looking forward to.

Retrospective

Writing this article made me look back on my journey and made me realize how every time you are constantly reconsidering what you've taken for granted. I have seen a lot of people making videos where they talk about what they will do if they have to restart everything and argue about that.

Personally, I think that I would do exactly the same because of the people I've been glad to meet. The opportunities, the enlightments, and also the guidance I got from this experience is what really matters not the languages or the salary.

That's all for today ! Thanks for reading me as usual have a nice day !