One thing that I can say for person who just started coding is, pick some programming stuff you enjoy outside school or work. I know a lot of software engineers, being burned out in the field. I think that is because the joy of programming is being sucked at work. This may be so vulgar of me, as a 22 year old because I still have a long way to go, but finding programming stuff that I enjoy doing seems to cancel out the feeling of boredom and/or difficulty of work. Moreover, nothing beats the joy you get by working WITH people you vibe to.

Background: I came from a non-science high school. Our class, did not have any programming subject, so I really entered college and took computer science with zero programming knowledge.

At the very first, our class was introduced to the C language, and made some applications via the terminal, but that was it - one semester. I cannot even remember the syntax for C now. Then we had java. It is the main language taught at school and through it my classmates and I learned the solid foundations of programming.

I can still remember, I was reading a Java book and was going along with the tutorial code. I was so amazed by the GUI that popped out, turned out I was copying the java swing components, and that was when my fascination for Java and programming in general, started.

Looking back, I think one thing that I loved most in this journey is the people, my classmates and friends. My classmates and I would go on an overnight and do all those Java coding needed for our projects (aaahh, nostalgia XD). The picture below is us doing Java overnights. I am that weird smiling person at the back. (I miss them huhu) My friends and I doing Java overnights

I wrote my thesis with java and lots of other group projects that a professor can think of. Almost 90% of my college life is java.

This is me during my graduation XD. Thank God! My Graduation Picture

I started working immediately after graduation and my first work is also as a java developer, and the company is using Java Enterprise. It still my same old, same old love, java. But I felt that I am being caged. The Information Technology is always in a fast-paced evolution and I am stuck with it. That is why I actively searched for ways to go out of that cage, and I stumbled upon The Odin Project. It guides you through your web development journey. With it, I started to actively create hobby projects, basing inspiration from odin's curriculum. Currently, I am working on the full Javascript developer path. You can check out my github portfolio here.

I am not sure why I started to love the curriculum for some reason. Probably because, the side projects I wrote can be deployed without the need of complex configurations? I am using github pages as it is free and very convenient, and I can always boast my work from there.

I am doing front-end development in my free time. Java will always have a special place in my heart as I have said. It opened doors for me.

I hope I can also work with front-end more in the future. Currently, I am exploring javascript frameworks like react and angular, google's free online database firebase and some css frameworks like tailwindcss and bootstrap.

That is my six-year old programming journey so far. As I continue, let us see where it will bring me.

One thing that I can say for person who just started coding is, pick some programming stuff you enjoy outside school or work. I know a lot of software engineers, being burned out in the field. I think that is because the joy of programming is being sucked at work. This may be so vulgar of me, as a 22 year old because I still have a long way to go, but finding programming stuff that I enjoy doing seems to cancel out the feeling of boredom and/or difficulty of work. Moreover, nothing beats the joy you get by working WITH people you vibe to.

Thank you for reading my very first post in this platform.

Regards, Pat

This post is also available on DEV.