“You are a girl, what kind of programming do you like?” - this phrase became my farewell to the world of information technology. The phrase of a loved one in response to the careless manifestation of feelings bursting me. But if only I had listened to him, there would have been neither a tale nor this progress.
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My story: the meaninglessness of old knowledge and the desire for a better life
Hello, my name is Vika, and I have been considered a humanitarian all my life.
Information technology has always been something magically out of reach for me for several reasons.
It so happened that I spent my conscious youth on the bashorg. For me, the humor in the style of “how to patch KDE2 under FreeBSD” was incomprehensible, but I felt some pride that I knew about it, even if it was at the level of familiarity with the letters.
During my studies, I only had one mini-course on HTML - but that didn't stop it from popping up as an image of a beautiful page with hyperlinks in my head seven years later.
But the opinion of the environment was fundamental. I was considered, if not stupid, then completely deprived of my abilities in mathematics. As a teenager, I accepted this opinion without even thinking.
In twenty-four years, she acquired a high school diploma and two diplomas of secondary vocational education. The last one was pharmaceutical. My love for pharmacology began with the realization of some power over the human body and the presentation of drugs as the most powerful weapon in the hands of a competent specialist, which can both help and harm. Years passed, knowledge grew: pharmaceutical conferences, the legal side of pharmacy, handling objections, and so on.
A bit of a five-year upgrade:
Resume fragment
Along with knowledge, the understanding of their meaninglessness grew - laws that are not observed and do not want to be observed in pursuit of revenue, and an environment that breaks your lovingly built house of cards of a favorable environment with a sense of self-importance. I didn’t burn out, but I wished for a better life for myself. After all, we are what surrounds us, right?
How I studied and am still learning: minus a broken keyboard, plus a cool portfolio project
The first experience of learning to program ended after a month of beating my face into the keyboard - it was difficult to comprehend anything in a randomly found book on the Internet and an open notebook. The ardor subsided, the desire subsided. For a year. After that, I decided that I needed to start with the development of resources.
Articles, websites, familiar programmers, a bunch of educational projects that promise to make you an ideal developer in three months, or even earlier, channels on a well-known video hosting site that provide a lot of necessary and not very information. I had enough desire and opportunities, the problem was the lack of systematization of my knowledge. And determination. I was not ready either to spend a whole salary for a pig in a poke, or to close my ears, which poured from all sides: “You don’t have a technical education, it’s too late for you to study, you have to think about the family, you must, must, must…”
And then I found out about Hexlet. Quite by chance, it was mentioned in passing in one of the conversations about the difficulty of self-study. Not as a one-time course, but as a full-fledged school. And I got hooked.
The turning point happened quite recently, after the end of my first project. This is his favorite piece:
Console game I made myself
Work in your own account on GitHub under the guidance of an experienced mentor is perceived in a completely different way. And such actions as initializing the repository and setting up a working environment using the package manager, described in "tasks", are colored with an exciting sense of responsibility for what you do.
Out of habit, a set of “tasks” makes you stupor, but you begin to understand why juniors are asked for projects in their resumes, at least non-commercial ones. This is a completely different level of perception. This is the moment when you already got acquainted with the concept of variables, learned how to write functions, including anonymous ones, learned about linear-iterative and linear-recursive processes, and exactly at the moment when euphoria overwhelms you, and the feeling that you you can change the world, it leaves only in a dream, they tell you: “Create a file and write”, “Select the general logic and put it in a separate function”, “Don’t forget about the correct naming and design principles”, “Don’t complicate it!”. Like a cold shower on the head, which does not cancel its boiling. I am extremely glad that I managed to catch this feeling before starting work “in the fields”.
I managed to show my individuality only in the readme:
In readme you can unleash creativity
Learning has always been difficult. OOP at one time seemed to me an unbearable obstacle. There were countless attempts to understand at least the basics - I lost ten days on this, receiving about the same condescending messages in the style: “Just don’t give up.” But at some point, it helped to determine the desire to close everything and hide in a corner as a protective reaction of the body to attempts to assimilate an abundance of new information.
It has become easier. At least that's how it was with learning SQL. Perhaps because of its declarative nature, of course, but this is not certain.
There is a project, the summary is ready. Ahead of the interview
At some point, I realized that if pharmacology is “power” over the human body, then programming is “power” over almost the entire world. The programming language, in turn, is a weapon that can both raise a company to a new level, and, by accidental negligence, destroy it. I called myself a latent dictator and threw myself into the abyss of information technology with my head.
Six months ago, I was proud that I set up a working environment on Windows, collected a whole list of books and thought about the fact that I want to connect my life with programming. Now the subject of my pride is that very full-fledged project, a list of books I have already read from the collected ones, but most importantly, understanding the importance of basic knowledge and the basics of the programming language that I have chosen. And the awareness of the responsibility that falls on the shoulders of everyone who associates himself with the development.
Of course, this is still a very small track record, I have a lot of work ahead of me, but I wanted to give a little inspiration to those readers of this tale who once faced with an arrogant “maybe it’s worth finding something simpler”, give readers of this article with skepticism a little confidence that there are people who approach the study of this or that programming language with all responsibility, and give themselves a little courage.
Because the summary is ready, the most important knowledge is obtained, only a little decisiveness is missing. But now the pig in the poke is me. She didn’t close her ears, by the way, she learned to disengage from other people’s opinions. I took three courses in abstraction.
Source: habr.com