All Roads Lead to Rome … or to Front-end!

Photo by David Köhler on Unsplash

I guess I’m not the first one changing career path more than one time, and I’m definitely not the first one who has wondered what to do for a living. The choices we make depends on who we are, our opportunities, social structures, childhood, the people around us, and so on.

I’ve always been a philosophical and creative soul full of curiosity and the will to learn and discover. I’ve had many ideas on what I would like to do for a living, and I’ve also tried some out… for example classical singing, space research, health care, acting, career counseling… and now I work as a optician assistant.

So, life isn't just about one path, never losing track or never going towards a blind alley. Life is about taking different paths, losing track, finding new paths as well as taking roundabouts. You could always look back and wonder why you went that way or that way, but life isn't like following a map going straight from point a to point b. It’s much more complex. It’s about will, emotions, confidence, environment and things that happens a long the road that you can’t predict.

So how did I end up on the ‘front-end road’?

Well..! Let’s try to make this long story a short one… I’ll make some sort of chronological list of memories and thoughts.

1. Year 1990: A creative soul was born having no idea about this new internet break-through, html and http.
2. Year 2003: A teenager that loves spending hours writing basic HTML and CSS for my profile at a social media website.
3. Year 2006–2009: Studying at the school of space technology (upper secondary school). On my free time I sang in a choir, led a theater group, practiced yoga and danced modern dance. Several of my classmates on the other hand, spend their free time building computer hardware, coding in Python and gaming.
4. Year 2008: A course in ‘computer-something-something’.., making a basic website in HTML which I found very fun and creative. At the end of the course it was a final test in the ‘terminal-something-something’ that felt like going through a labyrinth with different commands and problems to solve to be able to pass further on. Remember I tried my self out a lot meanwhile having the feeling I had no idea what I was doing. Suddenly I got a message “Aha! You’re trying to cheat on this test, well it was a creative one, so I’ll give you an extra point for that anyway”. I never had the intention to cheat, but this message gave me some confident feeling in contrast to the feeling of having no idea about this.
5. Year 2016: Having a Game of Thrones evening with a close friend of my. We starting to learn to know each other just a year ago. However, she is a computer science engineer that now career coaches me. Me, a lost person with a bachelor degree in career counseling. Pretty ironic! Anyway, my friend mentions front-end development, and that’s the first time I heard about that.
6. Years pass… I’m curious, googling around: front-end, back-end, C#, Java, Javascript, Python, C++…. Which of this is most attractive at the job market? Which do I feel is the most fun for me? And could I really do this?
7. Spring 2019: Starting studying ‘applied system science’… Many of my team mates has programmed many years, one work as developer already… My confident and enthusiasm falls… I get scared, and get this thoughts that people who get this jobs are those who has programmed since many years back, on their free time, builds hardware for fun, and are computer genius, how could I compete with them on the job market?
8. Autumn 2019: Changes career to optician assistant.
9. Spring 2020: Corona pandemic is a fact. Now I might lose my new work as an optician assistant because of the pandemic effects. I’m still curious about front-end, and recently two cousins of mine changed their career into front-end developers by some intense courses in Holland. Maybe I could do this too?! I start diving into front-end again, watching tutorials on YouTube, googling, found out about ‘Tjejer Kodar’, women in tech and front-end, read about people like me with different career backgrounds, and I decide to apply for Technigo Front End Boot Camp.
10. Autumn 2020: I become one of the students at Technigo Front End Boot Camp. It’s definitely a boot camp! It’s a very intense learning process and my feelings goes hand in hand with how the learning goes. Sometimes I love it — it feels so fun, creative, problem solving, and I could sit for hours and hours learning and coding. Sometimes I hate it — I just can’t get it to work, there are so much to learn that I would like to know already, and I feel frustrated. Then I get it to work and I love it! So, confidence goes up and down. It’s definitely an emotional roller-coaster as one of our teacher said this boot camp would feel like. I take a deep breathe, remind myself that I do a good job considering working as an optician assistant 85–100% and studying at 50% (or even more), and also, that Rome wasn’t built in one day!