How I Became A Developer: Part 1 – The Very Beginning

Before I became a developer, I wondered how I would go about it. I didn’t have the background for doing IT or web design, much less building websites and applications. No, I sure didn’t. I’d worked in fast food restaurants as a cook, been the janitor/groundskeeper of an apartment complex, a cashier at Walmart, and a gas station attendant. Nothing fancy. Nothing related to coding or tech.

When the idea of becoming a developer started growing roots in my mind, I tried to find other people who had already done what I was thinking about doing. Sure, there were plenty of YouTube videos hosted by people with Computer Science degrees talking about how they became developers. That wasn’t me, though. I didn’t have a CS degree. I did have an Associate’s Degree I’d earned through a community college, but that certainly wasn’t valuable in becoming a developer. At the point right before I decided to pursue becoming a developer, I had been working in a factory for the past couple of years, making parts for machines. Right before that I’d been working in a poultry processing plant, spending my days in the evisceration department and getting covered in anything you can imagine coming out of a chicken (and some stuff you probably don’t even want to know about).

With this in mind, I’m starting this series on how I became a developer. I want to be able to show others who might be in a similar situation one way that you, too, can become a developer. More importantly, I want to show that IT CAN BE DONE! I mean, there’s not much farther away you can get from professional developer than cleaning chicken to go to KFC.

The Initial Seed

So what made me get the idea to go dev in the first place? After all, I hadn’t been doing anything remotely related to it to make money. I’d pretty much just been doing “hired off the street” jobs since I got out of community college.

Well, it started when I wrote a novel.

I’d wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid. I’d tried making money as a writer of fantasy short fiction (think “Lord of the Rings” but you could finish it before you went to bed) but that hadn’t been successful. I decided to really push myself and write an actual novel. It took nearly a year, but I wrote it, edited it, and self-published it. I bought physical copies of the book and sold them at work at the poultry plant. It wasn’t a life-sustaining amount of money by any means, but I was getting positive reviews from people.

Afterwards, I decided to write a new novel. This time, I wanted to write a sci-fi story. I’d never written science fiction before, so this was going to be an even bigger push. Long story short (pun intended), I wrote, edited, and self-published again.

I loved writing the second novel so much that I decided I wanted to write another science fiction novel. This one would be about hackers. The problem was that I didn’t know very much at all about hacking and hackers. Sure, I’d seen a couple of movies with hacking, but what I saw in The Matrix seemed to be pretty far removed from what actual hackers did. I needed to know what hacking was really like if my new novel was going to be accurate.

So, I started studying hacking

Studying Hacking

I wanted to have a good basis for my new book I was planning on writing, so I dove into hacking hard and heavy. I bought books from Amazon, watched YouTube videos, and even bought a second-hand laptop from a pawn shop so that I could download and use “questionable” software.

At some point, I decided it might be beneficial to learn how to read what I referred to as “website code.” Do a right-click on a webpage and choose “View Source” and there’s all that fun programming code to look at. Well, that’s the stuff I thought might be beneficial to understand if I were a hacker. I discovered Codecademy and used the platform’s free resources to begin learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The idea was just to be able to understand what source code was telling me when I looked at it. At this point, I had absolutely no interest in becoming a developer. Instead, I found I really wanted to become a hacker.

From Author To Hacker

In studying about hacking, I learned about ethical hacking. If you haven’t heard this term, it refers to a legitimate job where companies pay the ethical hacker to hack their system. It’s kind of like having a locksmith break into your house in order to see what kind of locks you should use.

Becoming an ethical hacker is not easy. Since you’re working with security, companies don’t want to give permission to just anyone to start rooting around in their systems. The best way to become an ethical hacker is to get the proper credentials and training.

I found a company online that had an actual ethical hacking curriculum where you could get training and accreditation! This was exactly what I needed! Unfortunately, the course was several thousand dollars and I didn’t have that kind of money.

I started saving up my funds for the course and, in the meantime, I continued learning from Codecademy. I figured it was best to learn something while saving up. I also got a copy of Kali Linux (a linux operating system that comes with a whole host of hacking tools built in) and started working with it, using my home network as my “target”.

Just before I saved up enough money for the ethical hacking course, I discovered that the company selling it was found to have malware in their course content! Well, I obviously wasn’t interested in a company that was either making malware and spreading it to people or else they were so incompetent that their own material had been compromised (not really a good look for a company touting courses on cyber security).

Now what?

The Question That Changed Everything

I was working at the machine parts factory at this point, wanting more than anything to be doing something else for a living besides working there. I was frustrated, unsure of what to do, and honestly kind of angry about my situation.

I had a coworker whom I often talked to, and I told him about what had been happening in my attempt at a career change. I explained how I’d gone from wanting to write a novel about hackers to wanting to become a professional ethical hacker, to being unable to do that now given the situation with the malware in the course content.

“On top of that,” I said, “I know all this stuff about how to build websites. I thought it would make me a better hacker, so now I’m left with this web development knowledge. What am I going to do with that?”

He looked at me, and had an expression on his face like he was considering something deeply. Eventually he replied: “How much do you think you’d charge for a website?”

“Um, I don’t know,” I replied, confused. “Why?”

“I’m starting my own business and I think I’ll need a website. I’d like you to build it for me. So, how much do you think you’d charge me?”

And with that question, my whole life changed.

Join me next time in How I Became A Developer: Part 2 – Freelancing.