Hello World

I am what they term a "self starter" when it comes to software development. My first days of coding were back in 2009, mucking about with VB.NET in Excel spreadsheets. I thought I was pretty good too, being able to hide and unhide cells automatically. But the spreadsheets I supported were a pain, constantly being locked or broken by others and I was getting fed up of fixing the problems people caused. So in search of a solution I did my first real software engineer Google search, landed on Stack Overflow and read the words "build a website instead".

I'll be clear, prior to my spreadsheet dabbling I had never touched any programming languages at all. I'll be the first to admit I was probably very arrogant in my thinking "how hard can it be" when confronted with the option to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But I was young and naïve so I dived heard first into W3Schools online tutorials and got learning.

My first attempt, in hindsight, was an absolute mess. My plan to replace these wonderfully pretty Excel spreadsheets with a modern website was flawed, in that I had replaced well functioning hiding and unhiding of information, with walls of plain text coupled with a bright red company branded navigation bar. Despite all this I was proud, so I showed it off to my colleagues and sang from the rooftops of how it was the future way of working.

My colleagues we're unimpressed. They too preferred the pretty spreadsheets a lot more and really weren't up for looking at white pages full of black text. I took the feedback fairly hard at the time, after all I'd spent hours learning these new languages only to have my first ever creation rebuked by those who didn't realise the effort I'd put in. That said, fancy websites we're a thing, so if someone else could do it, then I sure as hell could.

I remember sinking many more hours into learning HTML and JavaScript than I had done previously. Specifically how to hide an unhide content, create buttons that changed when you moved your mouse over and even change the greeting based on the time of day. Version two of my website dropped and within days the entire section I worked in we're using it over the old spreadsheets.

The following years saw me improve the website, so much so that it was used company wide by various teams doing similar work. With my confidence high and my ability to demonstrate I could do technical things, 2012 saw me interview with the I.T. department for an Associate Technical Analyst role. In December of that year I was accepted into the fold of an operational environment, working on second line to fix incidents.

Initially, there was not much opportunity for programming, but I did make a hand full of small changes to the application I helped support. Primarily I was a sponge working with loads of gifted technical people and I wasn't going to lose the chance to soak up all their knowledge. After working closely with one colleague on some software we supported for field sales on tablet devices, I had my first real opportunity to get into the .NET programming space.

Fixing issues within our tablet software was a bit of a pain. It involved the sales agents heading to an office, connecting the devices to the network and then giving us a call so we could remote in and start our work. I took it upon myself to find a better way of doing this, so I taught myself .NET by building a WinForms application that could do the thirty minutes of fix activity I did in less than five. After a lot of local testing and fixing of bugs I shared it with my more senior colleague and we gave it a few runs. It worked wonderfully, sadly though a few months later the sales channel was mothballed and with it, my creation.

As time went on, the application we supported evolved and I was given the chance to add WPF to my list of skills. I spent a good chunk of my time working directly with one of the main contractors we had who was responsible for a lot of the infrastructure code that underpinned our application. This saw me delivering more and more technical change to higher risk areas of the codebase and learning a lot more about the .NET language and software engineering in general.

A round of cost saving and outsourcing saw the experienced contractors leave to make way for redundancies. At this point I found myself, mid level, as one of the more well versed in the application. Suddenly I was teaching other people how to code, reviewing their changes and organising branches and build pipelines. As more and more actual work began to move offshore, I found my technical skills dwindling. The majority of my time now was spent consulting with projects and the wider support areas about change and how it should be done. It was no secret I missed coding.

Towards the end of 2020 I made the decision to get back into programming and I've not looked back since. I'm pushing my career harder now than I ever have, diving into personal coding projects, delivering content on my new YouTube channel and more. I got here because one day, many years ago, I said to myself that something could be done better, that I could do better. Over the years I've definitely thrown my toys out the pram, but I've also never let anything get in my way or anyone tell me no.

It's been a lot of hard work and I've made my share of mistakes, but my goodness was it worth it. So to those of you who are perhaps questioning whether now is a good time to start learning a new skill, whether its programming or not, I say go for it.

Regret always comes late and it's a waste of time to wish you'd done things differently.

You CAN do it.