[igotsideas]

I had been working in a call center for 4 years and had not had any growth whatsoever. I was broke, lost, and felt trapped at my job. I would look at job postings on dice and monster but didn’t have any of the skills mentioned and thought I would have to go to college to get a decent position. I didn’t have the money to go back to school so I tried something else. I e-mailed 30-40 tech companies, asking if they had any internships to get my foot in the door. Two companies replied back. First company was a desktop support position and the second company was a marketing internship at a coding bootcamp. I took the unpaid internship at the bootcamp. I realized I didn’t enjoy marketing right away but stuck with it cause it was better than a call center and I wanted to learn how to code. I ended up becoming friends with some of the engineering instructors and that’s when I was introduced to programming. They told me what to focus on, study, and build. So when I wasn’t at work or the internship, I was reading and building. After a while, I got my first job and been writing code for almost 8 years now.

I can’t lie, I got into it because of money but I ended up enjoying building web apps and solving problems.

Things that I enjoy now are the people. So many cool, smart, and helpful devs out there. The flexibility is really nice.

There wasn’t one book or website. Honestly, reading documentation or learning a concept and just practicing that one thing until you completely understand it helps me. There’s just so many resources online now so I’m sure there’s something for everyone.

Edit: wanted to answer more of OP’s questions.