This is a story into which you could find a bit of yourself, a story about a dream which turned into a different reality. Just let yourself enjoy the telling and dream your dream… 😉
It’s the roaring late 2000s. You’re a teenager, your parents give you an iMac because they think you could get fun out of it - and tinker with what they think is a cool tech platform. Indeed, since this present you’ve been tinkering with software in your free time, and you really enjoy that. 🔍 You’re becoming an Apple fanboy (it’s not your fault, but their marketing team is pretty competent) and you struggle for that piece of technology, the most cutting-edge one, the platform of the future: an iPhone 📱 no, it’s not about status, you don’t give it a f**k, it’s because of the marvellousness of the touch screen, the brand-new app ecosystem, the endless possibilities you will be opened to. Therefore, you struggle for months, you save money, you get summer job and get paid from your parents for houseworks. Euro after euro, it’s July 2010 and you saved enough for the now-real iPhone4. 🥅
Few years passed, as you still shudder before the app world you want to delve deeper into. You want to be an active character of this revolution. No one around you understands you, but your teen feeling is sure about it: you want to develop mobile apps! 🚀 So, you open Safari on your iMac and you read somewhere that you need to know how to write code. You find some valuable advice: learn C, that’s the very foundation to get more complex stuff done later. Begin from the beginning sounds you very reasonable, and you get into it: with your Xcode you learn about variables, control flow, loops and more; by solving exercises you are shaping a developer mindset.
Fast forward, the high school is getting to its end and your mind is full with ideas, interests, will to know valuable people. As you discover the little corner of the world around you, you give up learning C - hey, there are nature, friends, university and your day only has 24 hours! But the destiny still brings you nerdy pleasures during these years: C, LaTeX, R, Fortran, MatLab and Python (oh, so cool 🐍). You really have hard-fun automating stuff and modelling the environment with your code; you look suspiciously to those who use those weird spreadsheets or document editors, and you help them with your passion and get their friendship beyond the uni. Few share your interests, and those few have values too different from yours. You’re not attending CS, so it’s pretty normal that people are not so acquainted with development, but you both share many ideas and you feel yourself striving in this environment. 😌
Just before the thesis work, you crash into a Git + GitHub course: what an enlightenment! 🐙 Exams are all done, you’re left with your thesis work and you can really manage your whole time. Now you give more attention to yourself and you start to feel that whisper… really low, but you know it’s there… you give it a shape and you recognise it: iOS development! But wait, you have no modern Mac, just that gift from your parent (which still roars, but its voice is now out of the more modern choir). What to do? As a student, you don’t swim in money pools and you already have a laptop which match all the university requirements. Just give up? Or flow with the stream, giving more value to what you already have? Enter Android development: it’s mobile, it’s cutting-edge, it’s a challenge you’re able to face. You start learning UI design, you experiment with some old Samsung your friend gave you, you learn a new way to develop. The online course you attend is incredibly good (as it was the one on Git) and you enjoy this moment: with this growing superpower, new possibilities will be opened to you. You showcase some one-page apps to parents and friends, but you know you’re missing many functionalities, though you’re not sure how to name them: storing data in proper way, sending them to other services, building a more complex logic behind the naïve interfaces you’re creating. Everyone got excited and they tell you to go on. 👨💻
Degree: achieved. First underpaid job: got it. Which position? Python developer, you feel it natural although you’ve been learning it very informally. 40h/week and commute drain your energies, you want to go out and get the best from your free time. Then a global pandemic rises and instantly your free time duplicates - a weird free time, but you know what you want. New morning routine: yoga and Android development course. However after two months, freedom calls again and you enjoy staying again with other people. And in the job market in your area, you try to apply as mobile developer but only fully skilled Android devs have success. You start reflecting. In your job you have a modest success with Python and you get up well with it; why stop surfing this wave? You already spend a lot of time with your computer and you cultivate other fields of life. You put mobile dev aside and you keep up with the Py world. You propose to develop a website for your colleagues - a real challenge, you’ve never done something similar! After the very first iterations, you clearly see it: it’s the same as it was with Android! Interfaces, dataflows, DBs, UX… Now you name each aspect of the dev consciously and you dive deep into them; you uncover another world and you understand better what you did before. You enjoy it: f u l l s t a c k - d e v e l o p m e n t. 🎯
You totally give up mobile dev: why care for an app when you can create something accessible from any browser, anywhere? You realise you can be a full stack developer - or maybe just create tidy backends or get caught from the cooler frontend ecosystem… You know that you’ve been exploring only a really little corner of this web, you know the only limit are those 24h/day, your mental sanity and the job opportunities. 🕸 You flowed with the river and you got to a new, unexpected, pleasantly challenging place: time to go on! 🌊🏄