I started my coding career 3 years ago by joining a Chinese tech startup to work as a team lead there. After that, I have tried many different things to become a professional developer, because being a badass programmer is my long time dream.
In the industry for a long time.
Actually, I have been in the tech industry for a fairly long time now. But I have always worked in the backstage - designing & building system infrastructure, implementing solutions, supporting users, and writing documentation. All of these jobs are fantastic and have a lot of potentials. However, there was always something missing in my mind that I didn’t feel right.
Being an IT professional is great to gain many hands-on experiences and get to see how systems work at the very end of its life cycle.
But there is a downside.
Nowadays, all the systems and apps we use daily are designed and developed by others - from big tech companies (such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, Tencent, and Alibaba), to individual developers, 3rd party software agencies.
As an end-user, you have no control over how the applications should work and look, and what functions they should have, you have no choices but comply.
And it is even worse for an IT professional, not only I need to comply with whatever systems or applications my end-users use, but also I need to learn into detail about them that I can support my end-user and maintain my system properly and hope there will be nothing change …for a while, at least.
“That is a fairytale, however.”
Because I have been in the industry long enough that I knew it - everyone wants to change once a while, and everyone does things slightly differently.
The result is, there are endless bugs and issues to fix when different systems and applications work together. And to make things even worse, once a company decided to modify its software or replace something, both the end-users and I need to start over again to adapt them without many choices.
I understand “the changes are for the greater good!“. But still, being led by others and wait for the fortune come by itself is not my style. And I guess it is not for most people out there neither.
There is a way to change it.
Today, many tech companies or startups start to put the “developer” tab on their websites, offering APIs and even source codes of their products, so other developers or companies can manipulate and use their services in the way they like and want.
However, the problem is, I need to know how to code, or at least, you need to understand the code and protocols those tech companies providing, so I know what are the options out there and where I can find the help.
In addition, with the ability to code, I can create customized applications that just for myself. I can define how the apps look like, what features I would like to include, and how they work.
That is it. The codability that makes me understand the languages that speak in 2020 in the IT industry, take control of my future career on my hand instead of others.
I think that is probably why I want to learn to code in the first place.
How it turns out today …
As I made the decision 2 years ago, I have been trying many ideas to get started - data analysis, machine learning, big data, data science, and finally, web development.
I still remember that excitement that I finish my first machine learning model about titanic disater, first time build a website from scratch to use multiple state of art technologies build a fancy personal portfolio website.
Fast forward today, I do not regrade my decision. I am actually pretty happy that I made that decision earlier than later.
Check out the latest tech news today -
Microsoft acquired Github, NPM - some of the most famous open sources companies out there and try to become an open-source company itself in 2020.
COVID-19 pandemic makes Work from home (WFH) becoming a norm in many industries (especially for the tech industry) in 2020.
So I think now I have more confidence in what is coming next in my career and I knew the more experiences I get into the coding world, the brighter future my career will be. That is probably the reason why I like to Learn to Code.
Please Note
In the next article, I will try to explain what is my strategy for getting a developer job from China in 2020.
I hope my experience above can give you some insight into why coding is becoming more and more important today and it helps you to make your decision in any way.