What made me consider going to Tech and want to become a software engineer?

There is no doubt that the tech industry is very well known considering the huge impact it has on our everyday life. Most people take for granted all the hard work and effort put into developing things that you use every day without even thinking where it comes from and how it even works. I was always amazed how progressively everything around us was being developed and things were discussed as something futuristic becomes a new normal just a few years later, amazing isn’t it? Every time I open up an app on my phone or a video game or be it something else I always ask myself — “How does it actually work?” and having that interest just not intentionally pushes you to research and explore and the more questions raises in your head the more you wanna fill those gaps.

I remember when the first time I was introduced to some sort of code it was in middle school and I believe I was 14 years old. We had a new discipline added to introduce youngsters to the World of Technologies and that was that time when pretty much every blockbuster coming out of Hollywood had a scene with a hacker guessing password on a second attempt or hacking pentagon’s security with one or two lines of code. Sure enough, that’s exactly what I was thinking we were about to be taught from now on. Next few weeks I was learning a simple program that I believe was called “Robot”. Square board 10x10 with a big red dot placed in the first square of that board, the teacher was adding few “walls” in there and the mission was to make sure that big red dot will travel from point A to point B by giving it commands mostly involved “if” statements, like go left, if you can’t go any further then go down if you can’t — then go right and so on. Definitely wasn’t exciting as I was imagining it would be, what can be useful for the world if you move one red dot from one side of the board to another. Since “programming” didn’t meet my expectations I switched my interest from hacking pentagon to the hardware of a computer and dove really deep into that starting with disassembling and putting back together my own stationary computer. Can’t tell you how happy I was that it turned on and started to load the operating system once again. From now on most of my friends were asking me for advice or help with the replacement of a burned-out motherboard or finding a reason why their computer won’t turn on. But what is interesting is that you can’t separate hardware from software, especially when it’s the year 2006 or 2007. Every time you change any piece of hardware you also need to make sure that the computer sees it and responds to it, which it doesn’t unless you somehow will tell him to do so — that’s where you need to install the driver. Of course most of the time you just make a simple installation of a driver and everything works fine, but sure thing there are times when it just doesn’t do anything and here you are trying to solve a software issue.

After graduating high school I had an important decision to make: what do I wanna do with my life and surely what profession suits my interests. I have spent a year in mechanical engineering on the advice of my parents and can’t say that it felt right. I decided to study arts which were incredibly interesting and made me stick with it. To be able to pay my bills I started to work as a bartender. “Vodka pays the bills” — that is what all of my co-workers were saying, but even though financial needs were the reason why I started working in hospitality, it definitely wasn’t the reason why even after graduating out of university with my bachelor degree in arts I stayed in the hospitality industry for a decade. I loved all of it, everyday you never know what’s gonna happen, is it gonna be slow or busy, is there gonna be a fight or a weird request or anything else you just name it. I’m very committed to my job and the responsibilities I have, and a great thing followed me along — career growth. I do love when something gets broken or doesn’t work the way it should because it gives me a task to solve it, to fix it, to figure it out even if it’s not my problem or part of my duties. I am always proactive and looking for a way to improve, organize and make systems more structured or implement new ones, and I’m sure that was the reason why I would get a promotion in a concise time. When I was 26 years old I became a bar manager for a Michelin starred restaurant in the city of San Francisco. In half a year I was asked to oversee another bar, in a couple of months later I tagged on a few other projects.

I don’t want you to think that I forgot what this blog is supposed to be about. I had to tell you that I always had an interest in tech and everything I’ve learned on my own years ago helped me a lot and I would say it definitely helped me to develop that problem solving set of mind. Unfortunately, a novel virus spread across the globe causing the world’s economy to shut down for months… The restaurant industry struggled beyond recovery, so many great restaurants and bars had to shut down their doors for good. All of a sudden the industry that you would think just recently was alive like never before now is not essential and must be shut down. As many have lost their jobs including myself, and not just once, having so much time off pushed me to new horizons. I’m the type of person who constantly needs action, to learn, to try, and make mistakes. The first thing that popped into my mind when I realized that I might need to change my profession was Tech. Why? Because it’s perfect for me: I like a challenge and being challenged, I like to solve problems and none of less — I love to learn, learn new things, new languages, new techniques, etc. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, what if I think it’s for me but it is not? I tried a class for JavaScript online and not gonna lie, there were times when you had no idea what just happened and why it is this or that way, times when you would look at assessment and would think that you never will be able to do that and it’s hard, it’s hard not to let it bring you down and give up but rather keep trying and trying and trying until you get it. I want to become a software engineer because it’s a lifestyle, it is a set of mind and it’s hard and challenging when everything around you evolving so fast, even code you just learn might not be useful in a year or so but you adapt, and that feeling when you make a code you’ve been working on in finally working the way it should — it just such a great feeling!