Keeping the Coding Dream Alive

[Music] i remember writing my first line of code and for me it was an experience that changed my life forever i remember i bought the book html and css by john ducket i picked it up from the bookstore and at the time i was already pretty interested in programming i always thought it looked pretty cool i didn't really know that much about it but um i think it was maybe just the colors on screen the text editors that looked really cool something about seeing code on screen really attracted me or maybe it was just the offices and the lifestyle knowing that there was a lot of opportunity there but something about it really drew me there and i got that book that night i took it home and i started going through it and i remember getting to the part of uh having to open up my first html file i wrote out some tags i printed i think hello world or maybe it was my name between those tags and as i opened up the text editor or the browser i remember just being blown away seeing some code that i wrote even though it was something so simple seeing some code that i wrote and actually have it execute and work and knowing that i was able to do that uh blew me away and from that moment on i remember just being hooked i remember thinking i can do this for the rest of my life this is so cool there looks like it looks like there's so much i can learn here and i wanted to know everything about it and just to give you some context i was actually running a web development company at the time i hired a few of my brothers and a few friends where we just built out wordpress websites we did seo some marketing for local businesses so my intent for learning html and css was actually just to enhance some of our wordpress themes i just wanted to have more control customize them but from that moment i knew that i was going to go much further into it so i finished up the book i spent a few weeks on that and i couldn't stop thinking about it and i remember taking it back to the company and i started teaching everybody all our developers how to write html and css code and that's the direction we started going we started enhancing those sites but the dream kind of changed the vision for the company was now to eventually start going into app development i wanted to become a full stack developer and i know now thinking about it it was kind of a big dream at the time even though um nobody else knew it i just knew that i was gonna do it one day but this was a new direction for the company and i was ready to go much further into it so after a few months we were learning our sites were starting to look a lot better and we're having a lot of fun with it something that often happens to our dreams is life just kind of gets in the way things change and you have to change your direction so in 2015 i proposed to my girlfriend we got married and i remember a couple of months before my wedding i started realizing that i'm gonna have to change up a few things because running that web development company and having a startup like that was really challenging there were months where i wouldn't have a paycheck or i have to cut my check in half because i had to pay the bills i had to make sure that all the employees were paid and as an owner you always pay yourself last in this kind of scenario so it wasn't going to be an option with a wife because as a single person i was i was just supporting myself it was pretty easy i didn't spend that much money and i worked most of the time so i didn't really have that many expenses but with a wife things are gonna change i'm gonna have to start paying rent here we're supporting two people now and i need to get something more steady so i ended up talking to one of my clients and i was able to secure in-house marketing director position so this was a part-time position where i was able to work on things like going to conferences for that client building you know creating brochures doing all sorts of stuff like that and i was still able to run that web development company so i didn't have to drop that but with this things got really busy i got that steady paycheck but i noticed myself working most of the time and i never made time to study anymore because at the time i was still trying to get better at html and css and i was constantly working and i realized that i didn't make any more time to code anymore or at least advance those skills and i thought to myself okay i just got married things are getting busy but after three to six months after i get a steadier paycheck things will slow down and i'll get back to that dream i'll put it on hold temporarily but it's not going to be for long and we all know how this story goes very often if you don't make an effort to continue that dream it's going to take a couple of years before you get to it if you ever do and i remember finding myself after a year a year goes by i still didn't get to it i started buying a lot of coding books i bought javascript books python books php and i didn't know what they were about i didn't get a chance to read them after um after working long hours i remember i'd come to the office extremely early before everybody and i would leave about 11 p.m and sometimes i'd sleep in the you know sleep in the office or i'll go home at night after 11 and i would still be working so i'd buy those books and i would just put them around the house just to kind of remind myself that that dream is still there you're going to get back to this one day and i'll put them in areas that i would still be able to see them so every morning when i woke up before i would go to bed i would see them on the coffee table on the bookshelf in the living room just to constantly remind myself so two years goes by at this point and i remember we're on a family trip and anytime you get a chance to reflect and on annual events like this a year goes by maybe new year's goes by we always think about our life we always reflect on how that year was what we accomplished and i remember thinking and i was looking at my own goals and what i wanted to be at that point and i realized two years goes by and i haven't done anything i haven't picked up a new language i haven't really studied those books um maybe you know just on and off i'll kind of peek into them read a little bit and then i'll just have to leave them and i remember thinking to myself okay something serious has to change if i ever want to achieve this because i've seen this happen way too often to people where they tell themselves a couple of months years goes by five years 10 years and they never get to that dream and then they're they're old and they talk about these dreams that they once wanted to accomplish so that scared the hell out of me and i i needed to do something right away and i remember i took a couple of weeks just to think about what i wanted to do and i kind of came to the conclusion of either i'm gonna have to quit my job and just do that web development company full time or i'm gonna have to shut down the web development company and um just quit the job and and pick one or the other so what i decided on was to keep that steady check and shut down that company so i split it with my brother we took some of the clients i kept a few he kept most of them and then we just kind of parted ways and because of this i was able to have some time after work i was able to end work and actually have some time to myself to actually study so after a few months i picked up the book automate the boring stuff with python and i went through it i uh i spent about three months studying python i got pretty comfortable with it i was building out little games learning out learning the functionality of it the basics and i needed a project to either work on or i was ready to start applying for jobs because i was getting uh pretty comfortable with it and just to give you some context our company did have a laboratory management system that i always wanted to build out and i told myself if i ever become a full stack developer that's going to be my first project and this will kind of get my foot in the door so i pitched my boss on the idea long story short they took it i was able to actually rebuild that outdated system and a few months after working on that i remember realizing wow i'm actually coding i'm learning every single day and i achieved the first part of that dream in things were back in motion i was learning i was building i'm now a developer and i was so proud of that moment and realizing what i was actually able to do after putting in all that work so about two years of working on this product long story short i actually sold it to my former employer where i talked about this in different videos and i kind of go over that story so i sold that product and the total was 41 000 and some dollars after that and i had a decision to make where i either go work for another position go find another position or i invest that money directly into myself and what i told my wife was we're not gonna do anything with this money i'm gonna put this right back into myself and we're just gonna see how long it last and i always had this dream when i first started learning when i saw people like traversing media coding for entrepreneurs the net ninja all these people had such a big impact on me and i thought if i can start teaching this would be the ultimate goal so i started my own youtube channel about eight months into it at this point um i didn't have to go back to work the money ran out but i started making uh money on youtube selling courses and that's kind of uh the summary of the entire story so i achieved the first dream of becoming a developer now i still develop products and i'm able to teach it so that gives me more satisfaction than i ever could have imagined and i want to leave leave you guys with something for those of you guys that are just starting your journey some of you guys already on your journey so i want to leave you with a few things to consider this journey you guys are going on this process it's going to be hard it's going to be probably the hardest thing some of you guys have ever had to do there's going to be sleepless nights there's going to be times where you want to quit there's going to be times where you feel like you're on top of the world and you finally got the ball rolling and then something happens to your code there's a bug and you're going to want to quit you're going to be stuck on these problems sometimes for for days sometimes for weeks i've seen people just never be able to get out of certain ruts you might even quit for a long period of time some people will quit for a couple of months but you just got to make sure that if this dream is something that you really want if it's something that you can't stop thinking about that keeps you awake at night you got to come back to it and many of you guys will i had my moments where i left it i came back your code it's going to suck at first after some time it's going to be a little bit better but it's still going to be bad and you're going to compare yourself to others there's going to be times where you're going to be proud of it and you're going to write a little little application and then you're going to see somebody code up a game on youtube and it's going to bring you back to rock bottom because you're going to compare yourself and you're going to feel like you have no business calling yourself a programmer people around you won't understand what you're trying to do you're gonna have to make a lot of sacrifices i skipped out on many family trips many camping trips had to tell friends no couldn't hang out with him because this was something too big and i couldn't let it go this dream's no walk in the park but again if it keeps you up at night if it's something that you can't stop thinking about you have to go for it because there's nothing better than looking back a few months a few years later after all that hard work seeing all that pain that you had to go through and seeing the developer that you are there's gonna be people that are gonna talk to you years after that are gonna be blown away by how you remember all this code how you're able to do all you do and they're gonna think you're a natural born programmer but you're gonna know that it's because of all that work you put in before there's things that i would have done differently in my own journey there's a lot of mistakes that i made but at the end of the day it got me to where i am now so one thing i want to say is if this dream is big enough if you really want it you have to go get it

Channel: Traversy Media

Views: 182,013

Keywords: coding, programming, motivation, motivational, technology, giving up on coding, inspiration, code

Id: 3YK96_qfc-Y

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 15 2020