How I became a Software Developer
Nowadays you normally have a subject in school that is related to computer science. Back when I was in High School, I sadly didn't have that. My experience with computers stopped at playing video games. Installing and configuring a mod for GTA San Andreas was the greatest feat I accomplished.
Before graduating I didn't have any particular idea of what I wanted to do. I knew I like sports, English, physics, and maths. Since my parents couldn't support me with college I decided to take advantage of an opportunity that is fairly unique to Germany. You can get a college degree here while working for a company and the company will pay your tuition. This system exists for industry-related subjects only since very few people will pay you to get a degree in Philosophy. I aimed for a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering and business management.
I started studying in 2013 and got my degree in 2017. I enjoyed the time, also writing my first line of code (Java) in the process. I had no idea what I was doing though. At the end of my studies and while working as a Quality Engineer, I came across the need to automate certain tasks in Microsoft Excel. I started reading up on Visual Basic for Applications and started hacking away. I loved it. Solving these puzzles was just amazing. I quickly noticed that the one day I would spend on this was the highlight of my work week. I knew that meant something.
So in my spare time, I took up some HTML and CSS and eventually some JavaScript. I wanted to do stuff on the internet. I have always been fascinated by this medium that connects all of us. I stumbled upon FreeCodeCamp and was immediately hooked. I blazed through the first sections of HTML, CSS, and basic JavaScript. From that moment it was clear to me that I needed to do this full-time. I didn't want to go back to university and get another degree, so I applied for trainee programs. One company offered me a shortened apprenticeship (24 months) instead of an 18-month trainee program, which would bring the benefit of earning at least an official certificate as a Computer Science Expert in the area of Software Development. I took it and began my apprenticeship in February 2018, leaving my high-paid industry job to learn again.
At the agency for Magento E-Commerce solutions Tudock I learned all about web development. Starting with the Symfony-Framework in PHP transitioning to Magento. I also got to experiment with React and Angular, but just built basic prototypes with these technologies. The rest was vanilla JS. Next to working I always had to participate in some computer science-related schooling to get the certificate. Due to me already having a bachelor's degree and very good performance in school and at Tudock, I got suggested to shorten my apprenticeship even further to 16 months in total. My final project was connecting multiple customer Magento shops to a central dashboard via O-Auth and visualizing data in different charts with Chart.js. I received 100% for the project with the presentation and ended the apprenticeship with a grade of A.
I learned a lot and also got to experience the project manager role as I had to coordinate Ukrainian freelancers for two projects. But I wanted to break free from developing Magento and took another opportunity at axel springer, where I'm a Software Engineer for COMPUTER BILD and AUTO BILD since the middle of 2019. I started working a lot with VueJS, but nowadays I work mainly with ReactJS and Laravel. In 2020 I started to acquire some credit points in computer science to finally enroll in a Master's Degree in Applied Computer Science in October 2020. This is a part-time degree and will conclude in November 2022.