Ever Considered Quitting?
This is a private post 🤫
This means it's probably incomplete and not intended for public consumption.
I was listening to James Q Quick on his podcast, he was doing his origin story and there were some questions being asked and someone asked this question which got me thinking.
Did you ever consider giving up?
(This is coming from my privileged background)
The thought never occurred to me.
Sure I’ve had terrible times at work, but I never thought “You know what, I’m going to be a carrot farmer instead.”
It’s strange, because I wasn’t in a great spot when I started web development in late 2016.
I had just parted ways with my last (VBA) client and I was at a crossing point, I knew the market I was in for the skills I had where limited.
I could keep on doing what I was doing for a decade (from 2006 to 2016) prior to that in automating Excel spreadsheets for large financial organisations.
Or I could reskill and work in the place where a lot of the tools I had worked with 10 years prior to that were all moving to, the browser.
There were some bumps in the road for me, I started with Python and the web framework for that Django and I was bewildered with the filing structure that you needed to follow, I don’t recall much else about it apart from feeling overwhelmed by this crazy filing structure.
I saw a freeCodeCamp post from Quincy which talked about the many uses of JavaScript and the upshot was bet on JavaScript.
Bet on JavaScript
From there I started the freeCodeCamp curriculum and set on my way to become a web developer.
I’m so privileged that I never considered giving up!
Why?
I’d spent 10 years prior to that in pretty toxic places, I knew if I needed to make a something work it was on me and the unconscious biases that I bring.
There's a reactions leaderboard you can check out too.