My first experience with coding was honestly not a very fun one. I took a coding course in High School and told myself this was something I never really wanted to do ever again. I didn’t understand what I was accomplishing or why. It was all command-line and boring. I cared more about putting together the computer components and playing games on them. So I finished the class and that was the end of it… for a time.
Fast-forward several years and I was doing exactly what I thought I wanted to do. I was an IT HelpDesk Technician building and fixing computers for a payment processing company but after a few years, I didn’t really see an easy path forward in my career. It was the same problem and the same people every week and I just started to feel stuck. However, this job was not all bad and I actually made a really great friend who had a very clear passion for development and a desire to learn. He invited me to work on a mobile app with him after work and teach me some things along the way.
We worked in Unity and the further we got into it, the more questions I had about how he was getting our objects and characters to move around and interact with each other. He taught me what he could and the rest we had to figure out together. Eventually life got in the way and our project fell by the wayside. I still worked on it when I could, but now I was looking up how to do and understand individual pieces of the software and programming language we were using. It was very much like my programming course in High School, but I no longer minded since I was very invested in the results being produced.
That leads us to now. I still have not completed the application, but I’ve been able to deploy a test APK to my own and a few family member’s devices, but now I’m here to start from the ground up and truly learn how it all connects. I’m excited to learn more and actually understand what runs our machines, build a marketable skill and creative applications, and be a part of a cool community in the process.