10 months ago i was clueless about how to achieve my goals. this is not a pep talk on how to do that. this is just another stranger on the web moulding just a few bytes into a personal story. and it’s really because of a story from a stranger on the web that, 10 months ago, my life has changed.
so, rewind to september 2018: the end of my late gap year was approaching. i spent the previous months doing some serious introspection and i realized that my music-making pursuit wasn’t actually aligned with my values. naturally, i fell into a mild quarter-century crisis.
i didn’t randomly pick the “quarter-century crisis” term: a similar phrasing was exactly what drew me to read a 59 minutes article on medium, titled “how i landed a full stack developer job without a tech degree or work experience”.
now, i had no clue what “full stack” meant, but “developer” was a word that has always fascinated me. in the past, i had my random moments where i would barely scratch the surface of what coding was, but i’ve always had music to focus on and that was already a huge amount of knowledge to handle.
but this time it was different. without music as a professional goal, i had nothing else holding me back from pursuing something else. for the first time in my life, i was not obsessed with something i never questioned, i was strongly in need of pursuing a goal that would have lead me to an enjoyable job and i had a clear idea of what my priorities and values were.
that was good enough. good enough to give me a strong and growing momentum as i was reading through the stranger’s story. good enough to make me apply to the same coding bootcamp he attended, which, luckily enough, had a branch also in milan, not far from where i live.
i saw training as a developer to be the golden ticket to a special kind of freedom: since coding is ubiquitous and embedded in all kinds of industries, i could have a degree of flexibility on where and with whom to work with. my future became less of an unclear set of questions to which i had no answers, and i began to work on a daily basis toward my brand new goal of landing a developer job.
all-in mode: true. january 28th arrived quickly and the bootcamp begun. there’s a lot to talk about that, but it’s out of the scope of this post. nine weeks flew by and i learned enough to be able to build a web application from scratch, from the backend to the frontend, collaboratively. learning about programming, tools and best practices weren’t the only values i got out from those weeks. the humans there were simply amazing.
in such an environment, i felt empowered and supported. the momentum i cultivated in the preceding months simply spiked to levels i never dreamt of. i grew really passionate about programming because the staff there was capable of communicating the whole picture of what programming is about: a whole community of generous humans, sharing knowledge that’s not only useful for being effective in the job but, really, in life. programming is very much about the mindset, and having a good mindset equals having a good life, probably.
dealing with frustration, solving problems, embracing patience and humility, being mindful and knowing when to take a break, learning how to learn and enjoying the process. all of these and a lot more are surprisingly related to programming, and with that being said, i ain’t going anywhere else. this is where i belong.