Hello World!

Let me introduce myself and why I’ve decided to start writing these posts. My name is Jordan and I’ve decided to learn coding in the hopes of becoming a developer. At the time of writing this I’m 28 years old and my working history has primarily been marketing and hospitality. So why the change to IT and development? Well to answer that it helps to know two things about me;

I am incredibly competitive and hate losing (especially to a computer).
I am very lazy.

Now I know what you’re thinking “Why would you publicly announce that you’re lazy?” and you have a point, should a potential employer or someone wanting to engage in work with me read the first paragraph of my blog they’d already be thinking “Why should I hire him? He has self proffessed to being lazy”. What they, and most people, fail to acknowledge is that laziness and productivity are not one in the same. There’s a famous quote by Bill Gates that says;

I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.

So, how does this relate to my journey from marketing into software development? Well it all starts with one simple idea, Automation.

Let me explain what I mean by “Lazy”.

I’m not, and never have been, lazy in the sense I’ll just outright refuse to work hard, that’s why I believe a person can be lazy yet still productive. I’ve always been the kind of person that refuses to do a task in a particular way just because “That’s how it’s always been done”. I hate repetitive tasks, who doesn’t, and I especially hate doing them if I know there’s a better way. This is what brings me to the start of my learning journey, it all started with a picture.

I was the only person working marketing for two real estate offices and as such we had a lot of property listings that would go online each week. One day it was decided that each new for sale listing’s last image should be a quote for the potential rental income that property could garner. Creating the image was an easy enough task, the real issue was how would the information be easily changed? No one eles knew how to use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator and I’n order to keep it consistent I needed to only allow changes to certain fields. That’s when I had an idea, what if I made a web application that was essentially a form that someone could fill in and generate an image? It seemed like an easy enough project, I already have a heap of experience with HTML and CSS, I’ve built and managed Wordpress websites, “This should be easy!” I naively exclaimed.

It was this decision to create a simple form to jpeg generator that sparked the fire in me to learn more about coding and development. As I begun learning how to complete this app I became exposed to a plethora of information, things I had never considered or even knew existed, things that solved many of the coding problems I’d had in the past when trying to build a website from just static HTML. The more I researched the more I realised I knew nothing and the more I realised I wanted to know it all.

Leaving no question unanswered.

What is a javascript framework? What’s the difference between low and high level languages? How do I collect form submissions from a website? How do I centre a div? I had so many questions that I wanted answers to, each leading me to more questions and with each question came one obvious answer,

This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Over a year later and the passion has still not subsided, in fact it’s grown even more which is why I’m writing this article. I want to share my journey, I want to share my accomplishments along with my failures. As someone that hasn’t been doing this long my ultimate goal would be to inspire others like me to open up VS Code and start learning themselves. It’s scary changing careers late in life, especially when every other software developer I read about online has been doing it since they were a child. It’s daunting finding something you love and realising you’re late to the party. I am in no way an expert, but I hope that because of that you can resonate with my posts and learn with me.

So, if you have stuck around until now thank you, I’m excited to be sharing my journey with you and hope you get something out of it!