I didn’t wake up one morning and just say, “Hey. I think I’m going to become a programmer today.” No, no, no. It was an interesting path that led me to where I am and here’s a little bit of that story.
As you may or may not know I actually have a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. I was sure that was what I wanted to do. At least until I got my first mechanical engineering job. I was pretty good at it, but it was boring and the places I worked really didn’t have much interest in making new things. After a few months of that I knew I had to do something different.
So right after I finished my bachelor’s degree, I went straight to grad school for guess what? Mechanical AND aerospace engineering! But here’s where the twist came. I didn’t do one mechanical or aerospace thing for my thesis. I worked on robotics and machine learning! I think you can start to see where the programming comes in.
Grad school was a really hard time. My mom suddenly got sick and she died a few months before I graduated, a lot of people that I love decided to move far away, and I was sick for the majority of those two years. I knew I needed something that would give me more flexibility with my time because of all this craziness.
That’s when I started looking online for jobs that let you work from home and a lot of the ones I found were for web developers. That’s why I decided to become a programmer. I saw the flexibility they have and the salaries they can make. I won’t lie and say I had some great passion for it because I didn’t (and sometimes still don’t), but I worked at it long enough to the point I became good at it.
Now here I am with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering doing web development. I know some of you may think it was an easy transition since I came from a technical background, but the difference between web development and mechanical engineering is night and day.
They aren’t related in the least. I say that to tell you that you don’t need to come from a super technical background to become an awesome web developer. You just need some time and patience and the ability to not give up.
Hey! You should follow me on Twitter because reasons: https://twitter.com/FlippedCoding