An Act of Kindness that Helped your Career

I'll start

I was demotivated in my second year of university since I was falling behind in software development compared to my classmates. I knew had to write a little C and C++ but had zero knowledge in software developement (not even HTML!).

I had a conversation with a student, and the next day, he took about 4 hours out of his personal time to talk with me and urge me to start and not give up. He simply motivated me and provided me with a full description (as much as he could at the time) of the various alternatives in the software engineering fields, how I could get started, and how to obtain resources to assist me.

From that day on I was greatly encourage and started my first courses on web development.

This not only helped me get started in my career, but it also taught me to be willing to help others after experiencing demotivation myself.

On my way to becoming an self-taught developer, my boyfriend helped me a lot by encouraging me not to give up, no matter how hard times might be. I didn't have a job for over a year, so money was quite a issue. I tried to code every day, but we didn't know if I would make it.

Because of Covid, he wanted to leave our country for 2 months, and he wanted to take me with him. I wasn't convinced because of money, and I didn't have a laptop at that time, so when was I going to practice? We both really wanted me to make it as a developer, so I couldn't afford not to code for two whole months.

One day he came home with a MacBook 13'' M1 and said, "Let's go on this journey." I was happy, excited and anxious at the same time. Will I be consistent enough to code while on a road trip across the US for two months?

I was! I was so grateful that he had bought me a laptop and that I was able to have a great time overseas that I just had to acknowledge his generosity by coding every day.
When I got back home, I participated in a Hackathon where I got runner-up and started applying for jobs - 2 months later I got one :)

The most important one would be when a colleague aided me in a performance review on my first job. He explained to my boss what I did in the company that went by unnoticed. Resulted in a salary increase, but also rooted my as 'the css guy' in the office - a very nice boost in confidence.

Apart from that, I don't think any of my posts on dev would have gotten any audience if @ben hadn't pushed them. Dude I see you unicorn them very early on 👀

I got my first software job because they were looking for someone to do devops (this was pretty much before devops was an expression). The didn't advertise for it, and I technically didn't get the job, but a couple of weeks later they called me and said they'd made one to suit.

After being there for a couple of months and feeling completely out of my depth they called me aside and said they'd "lowballed" me based on the interview and gave me a pay rise. This was before my probation period had finished, technically.

I've never worked for anywhere before or since where they would have even considered paying more than they could get away with. It wasn't the big bucks, but it was very much appreciated and made me think that companies, teams and the like weren't all horrible, distant entities, and that maybe I wasn't as bad at it as I suspected.

When I was just getting started with DEV, @andreasklinger offered to jump on a few calls and just talk through some advice with me. It was all solid practical stuff and I really appreciated it.

It was by a student @Björn who gladly took the time to explain many of the programming paradigms and concepts in various programming languages. He truly inspired me to keep studying to become a better developer.