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Alex Gwartney
Alex Gwartney

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Coming off a hiatus in 2020 and looking forward to a new beginning!

So I want to start this post off by simply stating I am back! The past couple of years has been nothing but a massive roller coaster and as the title states, I am ready to go for round 2. So here I am once again starting up a new journey back trying to break into the web dev industry.

For you all that don't know who I am or what I am even remotely talking about let's get into a little bit of a back story. You may want to get something to drink as this is going to take a little while! I originally started the idea of getting a career as a programmer back in 2016. I was really hyped I went to school graduated with my associates and was ready to take on anything.

Little did I know a lot of my time was personally wasted since. I spent hours upon hours learning as much as I could about web development. But I sadly fell down the endless rabbit hole of never feeling like I could apply. So I settled to go into IT instead.

I became a help desk support for a hospital for a miserable year of my life in 2018. While I was making a lot of money and I learned a lot. The graveyard shift took a toll on me. So because of this I jumped ship and living in a small town it sadly is hard to find any real IT work. So I had to settle for working as a tech support rep for a pretty neat company called Glowforge.

I did this for the better part of 2019 before I realized working for a new start-up team for a company that was a start-up itself and had no direction of what they wanted from us at the time was just not for me.

So here was where I feel like I hit the bottom of the barrel. Since I left I needed a job fast, so I sucked it up and went to work for Walmart.... Ironically they did pay quite well, due to the experience I had working in IT. But as you can assume Wallmart is Wallmart and I never was able to get full-time work. So I once again found my self looking for a new job.

Which leads me to where I am now Im again doing technical support for a neat little startup out of long beach CA called Zwift. They are a cycling MMO yes your heard that right. And you should look it up sometime.

While I like the company I currently am contracted under, I bring my self into 2020. I am tired and burnt out on these types of jobs. They don't ever really pay well and just don't have the career growth that I want.

Which brings me to my original title. I have decided after a lot of thinking and playing with a lot of other ideas that I am going to charge full force into the web development game. I have picked up where I originally left off and feel pretty good about it.

I have overall learned that you will never feel fully ready and have to just go full force and go for it! Because of this, I have also been pursuing my other hobby of INDE game development. I even started a youtube channel about that progress. But that is a story for another time.

My current goal though is to keep hacking away at code for about the next 6 months or so. Just to ramp my self back up to speed as web changes so much and so fast. I will be building up my portfolio and then at the end of the next 6 months ready or not. I will begin applying for remote work.

In the time to come, I will be coming on here from time to time to post progress as well as tutorials ect. I have also decided to open up another youtube channel project as well. Which will come in time but for now this is where I am at!

I am really hoping that this time next year I will be looking at this post happy with life in my new job as a front end web developer!

So I hope you guys enjoyed the post and for you all that are in the same boat or are just learning your self. Don't let the feeling of being ready ever stop you as it will do more harm then it will good!

Top comments (2)

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emma profile image
Emma Goto πŸ™

Welcome back! What are you planning on learning first?

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alexgwartney profile image
Alex Gwartney

Thanks! I am currently playing catch up with the basics of JS. As a lot of it has changed with ES6 syntax. And then moving into some server-side stuff like Node and then moving over to react ect.