Journey To Code: How I Got Here - Part 1

This is an article that I originally wrote for my Wordpress site but have moved here.

As I have mentioned, this blog has been a long time coming. So, I am finally here to talk about my journey to code. As an FYI, I think this is going to end up being multiple parts but we shall see.

To get to where this journey began, I have to go back a while. In middle school and early years of high school I was a recluse. I discovered video games in middle school and they became a way for me to hide myself from the world. My later years of high school, when you begin deciding what you want your major to be in college, as if I knew, all I knew was I loved video games.

So I entered college with the intention of being a Computer Science major. However, I went to a military school. There were and are students who went to the school and majored in CS but I was not one of them. I know I would not have been able to keep good enough grades that first year of school so I switched majors. I switched to business and planned on majoring in accounting. I loved and still do love math. I also enjoyed that accounting was work, as in, I could put my head down work on debits and credits and balance sheets and look up and it was 1am. Clarification: At the time I don’t know if I ‘loved’ staying up that late, but I could get lost in the work and problem solve.

So fast forward to February of this year. I began investigating things that I thought I might enjoy doing after I left ministry which was coming up in June. As I was investigating, I would hear my brother-in-law, Ethan, talk about his Computer Science classes and it always intrigued me.

I knew that I could not go back to school. That was not an option. I need to be able to transition into work ASAP. At the same time I did not just want to work a job that I did not enjoy. I know I will be transitioning in and out of jobs for the remainder of my life but I wanted to figure out the type of work I wanted to be doing for the remainder of my life. Also, I am very well aware that this can also change, but as far as it depends upon me this was the goal. This is also where all of the old thoughts about CS and accounting and the type of work I like doing come into play.

Also, on a more philosophical note, Dorothy Sayers wrote an essay called “Why Work” and it is fascinating but the main point of it and what has stuck with me is trying to have the paradigm shift of doing the work because the work is valuable not doing the work for a paycheck or for leisure. A paycheck and leisure are both wonderful outcomes of work but not the goal of the work. Anyways, I would highly recommend giving that a read.

So I wanted to do work that I value and gives me value. Did ministry not do this? Ministry taught me a lot. And I believe in God’s sovereignty and therefore can never say that it did not give me value or that I did not find it valuable. However, as I got to know myself and sat under the counsel of friends and mentors, ministry was not the type of work I needed to be in. Ministry is flexible and flexibility drains me. I want/need defined work and ministry was largely left to be defined by me.

So from February until early June I began teaching myself how to code using Codecademy and every resource I was pointed to.

To be continued….