I guess my career really started in high school. When I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a game designer. Once I got to high school, I had the opportunity to take a basic web design course. This involved creating basic web pages with HTML/CSS using outdated practices like table layouts and iframes, and building some ugly websites. My first completed site had a bright lime green background with marquees across the top and all kinds of things that used to be cool on websites in the early 2000’s. Even though what I built was awful, that was when I realized I wanted to go into development. I was good at it, everything made sense to me, and I had fun doing it.
Fast forward a couple of years to August of 2013 where I started my pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at the University of Louisville. I majored in Computer Information Systems, a program offered through UofL’s business school. I was at UofL for three and a half years, and graduated in December of 2016. During my time at UofL, I started an internship with Aspect Software. I started this in December of 2015. I had the opportunity to work with a remote mentor who gave me some guidance and directed me to some tutorials to learn about some cool JavaScript frameworks and .NET MVC. While this did help me learn, I didn’t get much out of this internship. I had to work remotely and I was never assigned a real project that I could make an impact on. I sat in on meetings and shadowed a few developers, but not much else.
After I left Aspect Software, I started an internship with Farm Credit Mid-America in May of 2016. This internship was a complete 180 from what my experience at Aspect’s was. I had a development partner that I was adjacent to in the office, and I had a project to work on that was defined before I ever came in as an intern. The project had a direct impact on a top initiative of the company instead of just some simple project that interns would get assigned to so they wouldn’t bother anyone. I got to engage with the company’s customers on multiple intern retreats to visit customers and just to go have a good time. Once my internship was finished in August, I accepted a position at FCMA as a Trainee to work part time as a developer while I was still in school. I worked about 20 hours a week, picking up work items just like the other developers on the team I was assigned to. After graduating from UofL, I transitioned into a full time Software Developer role in January of 2017, which is where I am now.
The best experience in the context of my career that I have had so far is Startup Weekend. Startup Weekend is a competition where you go with an idea, pitch it for 60 seconds, and hope that your idea is popular enough to form a team around. From there, you have about 56 hours to flesh out your idea as far as you can. Market your idea, validate it’s something people want, come up with a business plan, and build a prototype to demonstrate. At the end, you get to present your idea to a panel of judges. During Startup Weekend, I was responsible for building the prototype of an idea a friend of mine and I had, which was the most popular idea in the beginning stages of forming a team. It was a trial by fire, really. I worked for 10, 12, 14 hours on Saturday and Sunday (and most of the night Friday) to get a prototype working for our idea to show off to the judges. I had the opportunity to use a very prevalent JavaScript framework (which I still use daily at work), and an up-and-coming technology that is now owned by Google. Building something that quickly, and seeing people actually use it was all the validation I needed in my mind to know I had chosen the right career path. It was the moment everything clicked for me and I started thinking “yeah, I could do this for a living.”
Although it wasn’t a terrible experience, the worst experience in the context of my career was probably my internship with Aspect Software. It taught me what I didn’t want in a working environment. I was disconnected from the rest of the team, and I had no defined goals. Many days I would wake up, turn on my laptop to be online, and then go off and do something else simply because I had no work to do. I hate being disengaged and I want a goal to work towards.
In the future, I would love to work for myself. I mentioned in a different entry that I take a lot of inspiration from Wes Bos. He works entirely for himself creating content for people wanting to learn web development. He has the ability to set his own schedule, dictate his own priorities, and choose what he wants to work on. Being able to work for myself would give me all of that and also allow me to choose the technologies and projects that I work with. I love the work I do now with FCMA, but there are times when I am working on projects that are unappealing or just plain boring. I’d love to work on my own time and choose what I prioritize, plus working from home a majority of the time would be a nice benefit.
I’ve got a long way to go in my career, but it’s been very useful to sit down and reflect on the steps that I’ve taken to get to where I am now.