Everyone always has a different story on how they ended up working in their line of work. But I think more specifically in the development industry the stories often fall around two different categories - either the person was really interested in computers or video games when they were young. To me neither of them were really the case.
Ok to be completely honest it’s not like I didn’t spend time with computers or video games when I was younger. But it’s definitely fair to say that neither one was really what I liked doing the most. As a kid I was really active doing stuff outdoors and playing with other kids. When I got a bit older my interest were really focused on motocross and just motorbikes in general. That interest would then translate to cars later as well. I was also doing a lot of sports when I was young, in addittion to motocross this meant swimming, cross-country skiing, ice hockey.
I always knew that I would get into some technical field but when I was in high school I didn’t quite had it figured yet. Actually my primary selection ended up being construction related but as faith would have I didn’t score high enough in the selection process. I managed to get into university though and my major would be in automation engineering.
In my school pretty much everyone had to took an introductory programming course (not a bad idea btw) with Python. I absolutely hated the course. A lot of times I would just freeload with friends who had already done the excercises. Everyone who has learnt to program knows that the only way to get good at it is to actually write code. I definitely wasn’t doing that. I actually wasn’t even able to pass the exam the first time - and it really was a basic one.
After finally passing the introductory course I realized that if I would continue on the automation engineering path I would probably need to do more programming. I knew that on the next course we would be using C++ and I had learned that it is really difficult (this might actually still be a fair statement). Because of these reasons I made the smart decision to change my major to mechanical engineering. This of course made sense - I had always been interested in everything that had an engine.
I really tried enjoying mechanical engineering and maybe first I actually succeeded. I decided that I would become an expert in 3D-modeling using things like Solidworks. But after some time it came obvious that it wasn’t really interesting to me at all. During my adult years I had started to become more interested in business related things as well. This led to me taking more focus on the business knowledge and studies. Somewhere in there I started to think that maybe learning a bit more basic programming would be smart career move.
Since I had already used some Python I started to play with that a bit. Also I noticed that the internet had a lot beginner courses for Javascript and you could build UI’s with that. Something happened - programming actually clicked for me the first time ever. Sure it wasn’t just smooth sailing but I definitely had a different approach and understanding now. Then it became more clear, I would like to do more of this.
During this time I had an Trainee position in a big corporate company. I was in a team that managed the Master Data for that business unit. A lot of my time was spent working with Excel. Since I now had this programming knowledge I was actually able automate some of my work tasks using Python. This was a huge point for me and it left me wanting for more.
I was still studying mechanical engineering. Since my programming interest started to come up I was relatively far in my studies. I decided that I would just complete my degree in mechanical engineering and then go on from there. The timing was also quite lucky - we just got a new major in Robotics and that actually meant that some programming was involved as well. I ended up taking a job in diesel engine factory, more specifically related to doing automated testing for the engine software in the RnD organization. This actually seemed like a good move considering my background and domain knowledge. Also for my Master’s thesis I got to build a machine learning model that would verify correct installation of temperature sensors (You can actually find it from here ). All this was really good experience.
I still wasn’t quite satisfied with my work at that point. Sure I was doing programming but that still didn’t feel good enough. Since the beginning of my programming interest I had done a lot of web development but that didn’t quite match what I was doing at work. It felt like web development would be the correct route for me. So I ended up searching for more web development related work and ended up in a smaller consulting company. And I couldn’t be more happy. During these years I have managed to gather knowledge so that I am able to help and mentor other people in my work now.
I don’t know what kind of first blog post it would be if I wouldn’t have a smart quote somewhere. So I will leave you with this old and good one.
You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.
-Steve Jobs