My Story, how it all started (part 1)

Introduction

Hi guys! 👋🏻 Today , I want to present my story. Before I’m going to start telling you my path and all of the obstacles I encountered, I’ll tell you a few words about me.

At this very moment, when I’m writing this article, I am working at E.ON Germany as a full-stack developer (more oriented to Front-End). Also, I used to work at ING Netherlands, HCL Technologies, Warner Brothers, etc. Besides of my full time job, I am working on side projects. I failed at opening an IT company (but this is another story). I will list all of the technologies I’m working or worked with at some point in my career at the end of this article

Did I caught your attention?

Intro before Discovering the IT field

I have had an attraction for technology since when I was a kid. I had a PC and Internet since when I was 6 years old. My mom bought it for me. And I’m very grateful that she did. She went by herself at a PC store and got it. A few days later, I got Internet too. At the beginning, I was just playing games like every child does. But 2-3 years later, I was already starting to (re)install my Windows alone, clean my PC piece by piece, install programs and games etc. Nowadays, all of these things seem easy peasy. And they are. But back then, it was very amazing for a child aged 8-9 years old to do all of these things. Now, I can do it in my sleep.

Discovering the IT field

Let's jump up to the age of 16, after a very dark episode from my life (maybe i’ll talk about this sometime, but today is not the day). I was in high school and I was thinking about the fact that soon I'll be 18. For those who don’t know me, I used to stay at home and play games all day. I had bad grades at school. Therefore,I think you understand my ex-concern. The important thing to know here is that I don’t come from a rich family. We weren’t poor. But we couldn’t afford a lot of things. Anyway, one day, I was thinking "What should I do with my life?" and, at some point in my brainstorming, I remembered about my aspiration for technology and how much I used to enjoy these things. So, I started to look on the available careers on IT and the most popular two categories were Software and Hardware. The hardware part wasn’t really attracting me anymore, but the software was a new brand thing. And I started looking into it. I discovered a lot of sub categories of that. Like, software, web, mobile (the data science, machine learning etc, wasn’t really an option back then or I didn’t pay attention to them at least). After a few days of documentation I started working with Java. I started learning all the things related to Class paradigm programming. Such as encapsulation, inheritance, etc. but it was really hard for a beginner. So I switched up to Web development. This is where I started with PHP until I encountered the same things as on Java. I went back to my search and I found out about Web Development. I started learning HTML and CSS and it was pretty easy, so I knew that this is my niche. But to be honest, I tried to learn Javascript as well but it seemed so hard. So I avoided that thing for like 3 years. I’ll come back to that later. Hope you’re still here reader. Stick with me!

First applications & interviews

It’s 2017, i’m learning HTML, CSS for 1 year already (as I said I avoided JS first years, well, more or less) I’m applying to all the web developer, front end, full stack jobs. I’m also applying to all the internships that I can. Long story short, at the first shot of 50 applications, I got 50 rejects both from jobs & internships. In the meantime, I was working as a car washer and other kind of jobs. I did get a little bit discouraged when everybody was refusing me but I kept applying. At some point, I was able to get 2 internships at Pentalog. One for Front-End and one for PHP. Also, regarding the job hunting, I was getting a lot of rejects still. After the internships, I successfully entered to the IT field and landed to my first job. The next chapter

First job

I was hired at a small company from Iasi, Romania (my hometown) named Happy Media. Here, I was hired as a junior front end developer but I was doing a lot of other things such as: Wordpress, Woocommerce, php (w/ codeigniter), presentation websites with HTML, CSS, JS with jQuery. If you don’t know what jQuery is, you are probably at the beginning of your IT journey. That's ok, just do a google search to find what it is if you’re interested. It was a very popular JS Library. Except the technical part, I had meetings with the clients, I came up with solutions to their needs. It look like a lot, but I cannot complain, because it was a great experience and it helped me a lot.

I think that's enough for today's reading. I’ll continue in some next posts. I think i will create a series (let me know your opinion in the comments). Also, you can let me know if you want me to continue with the jobs experiences or if I should have a much more brief approach.

Let me know what you think about it.

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