Welcome to my first project blog post! I was pretty intimidated going into this project since it is our first one and I am still fine tuning my basic coding skills. Recently news of a live action Avatar the Last Airbender series was released by Netflix and would be airing some time in the next 2 years. This news has created an increased interest in the original Avatar the Last Airbender cartoon that aired on Nickelodeon in the early 2000’s, and I wanted to be able to create a program that would be relevant to current events happening in the world to ensure my program would be helpful to its user in some capacity. This is where I decided to complete my CLI project on the Nations and characters displayed in the original Avatar the Last Airbender cartoon. I am also a huge fan of the show and have been since my childhood, therefore I found this to be the perfect subject for my first project!
There have been a lot of factors over the last couple of years that built up to the moment I decided I wanted to become a Software Engineer. It started about 4 years ago at the last company I worked for before coming to school at Flatiron. I got to know the development team and became close friends with a few of them! Listening to their conversations and trying to follow along with what they were talking about is what initially peaked my interest. Looking back on it, my interest was actually already there, it was just hearing them speak about it that made me really start looking into what software engineering actually was! After learning what their day to day looked like, i was pretty intimidated to say the least. The posistion I held dealt heavily with the customers actually utilizing our website, so I was the lucky guy who got to listen to all of their complaints! There were many bugs within our website, and even more within our internal operating systems that frustrated our customers, as well as myself, to no end! As I was receiving all of the complaints from our customers and reviewing the bugs within my day to day systems, I began to come up with great solutions that would highly increase the success of our internal and external processes, only, I had no idea how to actually put those ideas into play. In presenting these solutions to my manager, I was given a process to submit bugs and fixes to our development team to execute on. However, many of my submissions would be discarded or put on the back burner to make room for more ‘egregious’ issues. I wanted to know how to get this stuff done myself! Once COVID-19 hit back in March ‘20, I was unfortunately laid off after working at the company for 4 years. I spent the first few weeks applying for other jobs and realized that I did not really enjoy what i was doing. Therefore, I found this to be the perfect opportunity to explore new horizons and make the career change that would take me into the next chapter of my life. After hours of research on coding bootcamps and other software engineering schools, I found Flatiron. Reading about the community within the Flatiron school and the assistance in finding a job that come with it, it was a no brainer. I signed up and have now found my new career path!
I have also been engaged for one year as of today, 7/30/2020, (WOOT!) and want to be able to provide for my Fiancee, and my family, the future they deserve to the best of my ability. Unfortunately, the career path I was on previously would not allow me to do that. My Fiancee is an angel and deserves to be taken care of and provided for. She works so hard every day to make sure we are taken care of during this pandemic and I want to return the favor for the rest of her life in making sure she is completely taken care of no matter the situation.
These two major factors, among other smaller ones, were the driving firce behind my motivation to dive into the full stack Software Engineering immersive and I could not be more excited and motivated to continue my journey through the Flatiron program.
Life Is Good!