This is a space to share my learning experience as a software developer. Until this year, I was used to coding for myself in hobby projects, used to look at the job postings and think “gee, I don’t know all this stuff”. Later on, I started hanging out with other devs in group chats and got familiar with all the “letter soups” out there, AKA framework and technology names. Talking to them also helped me with becoming confident enough to apply to some of these postings.

In a huge nutshell, I started coding around 9 years ago, in 2008. Before then, the contact I had with programming was with RGSS in RPG Maker VX. All I could do was just copy and past the pre-made scripts into the program to customize the games. Yep, I started out as a script kiddie! That was back at 13-14.

We were taught Pascal in that class back in 2008, in an engineering course. Most people didn’t get to use it later, for us it was one of those obligatory classes… in my case, I liked it a lot! So much that I ended up dropping out of the course in the following year and continued studying Pascal in my free time. After that language came C++, Java, Android development in 2012, web development in the next years, Bash, Python and finally Ruby in 2016! Though how I got into shell scripting is a whole another story which deserves its own post.

My coding projects up to this point have involved automation scripts, configuring text editors, productivity tools and Telegram bots. Now I’m getting into contributing to open-source. Incrementing the hobby mindset into a profession. I prefer using the word “increment” because I’m like “I’m always doing this and like it a lot and right now I’m doing it for free… it would be a huge waste if I don’t use this skills for a living.”

Right now I’m preparing my contribution and application to Outreachy projects, navigating through the projects’ codebase, setting up the environment… and there’s other things going on which I plan to talk about at a later time.