My first experiences as a developer

Most developers start this story the same way. A computer at home, a game they wanted to change, a parent who worked with technology. Mine doesn’t go like that.

Until I was eighteen the only piece of technology I owned was a phone without a camera. I wasn’t interested in computers. I didn’t dislike them either. They were just not part of my life in any direction.

When I finished high school I had no idea what to do, so I took a technical course in IT. Not because I felt called to it. Because I understood there would be more job offers.

That was the whole reason. I picked the thing that looked most likely to pay.

The course

First semester: maintenance, networking, programming. I don’t think I need to say which one held my attention.

I was good at mathematics and my logical reasoning was decent, and for the first time that was useful for something other than a test. At the end of the semester I applied for the degree in Systems Analysis and Development. I passed, and for a year I did both courses at the same time.

The internship

After the technical course I got an internship at the institution where I studied. First contact with programming outside a classroom. First reality check.

It was horrible.

I had no idea what I was doing. Too much new information at once, and my main task was maintaining a system built by someone far more experienced than me.

It was the best thing that could have happened.

Nobody explained the codebase to me. I read it. I broke something small and put it back. I found the function that got called from everywhere and suddenly understood why the whole thing was shaped the way it was. Within a few months I was working on my own. The classes started to look useless next to what I was doing outside them. I finished the course anyway.

It lasted two and a half years. By the end of it I had built real software in several different technologies, and I had not yet officially worked a day in the industry. I arrived at my first job already knowing what a real system looks like.

Day one

At the beginning of 2011 I entered the job market properly. On my first day I was told I would be working in a different position from the one I had applied for, with a technology I had never seen.

I stayed.

Lost for the second time in two years, and the second time went faster — not because I knew the technology, but because I had already survived not knowing something. That’s what the internship actually taught me. Not the language. The tolerance.

The first years

From there it was websites and small apps, one after another, and I was learning new technologies constantly because the work kept requiring them.

I was usually the least experienced person in the room, working next to people who had been doing it far longer than me. Almost nothing I learned in that period came from a classroom. It came from building something that shipped, watching it break in a way nobody had predicted, and fixing it while someone more senior explained what I should have seen coming.

That’s the phase that prepared me for the next step in my career.

If I could talk to that intern

Things don’t always make sense at first, and that isn’t a signal about you. The first years are for learning, and for building the resilience to keep going while you’re still confused. The resilience is the part that lasts.

He wouldn’t have believed me. He’d have gone and found out the hard way, which sometimes is the only way it works.