My name is Eugene, I'm 27 years old, I have a child and the second one is on the way. I live most of the time in the city of Yekaterinburg. I have an education as a railway engineer, worked as a system administrator for several years after graduation. Today is the last day of my probation, although two weeks ago my teamleader said that you don’t have to worry, you stay. What I have today:
Work in an international company (without exception, all customers from the west, mainly Sweden, Norway). bodyshop company.
The possibility of rotation, there are many customers, the projects are different, everyone can choose to their liking.
Incoming native speakers twice a week.
Annual trip to a foreign corporate party.
Good food, lots of goodies.
Wonderful team, the number of smart people per square meter is simply fantastic.
But let's go back a little, a year and a half ago I didn’t have anything close to similar. He worked in a state-owned company as a system administrator, received an average salary for a hospital, knew English mediocrely, and in general there was no hope that life would start to get better. Accidentally on social networks stumbled upon the site CodeGym.ru, one friend described how a cool way to become a programmer and that he went through 5 levels in a couple of days. I decided to try, because. still at school he was fond of and even wanted to enter the then Ural State University on mathematical fur, but he lost his way. In general, why am I actually worse? It's a matter of small things, slowly went through 10 levels in a month, and then the action was just for a 50% discount, I bought an annual subscription. A month later, I quit my job as an administrator and went to spend the winter with my family in Thailand, with the idea that I would study every day and nothing would stop me, By this time, I was intensively learning English, perhaps a topic for another article, but podcasts in English helped me start most of all, I started with VOA, and then gradually increased the complexity with the advent of understanding. If anyone is interested in more details, ask in the comments. I started to implement my plan as soon as we arrived in the city of Ao Nang, Krabi province and found a house for the season. I can say one thing, you need to practice regularly and everything will work out, I had about 8-12 hours of work 5 days a week, which included both writing code and English classes. I can say one thing even in the new year, I started working on January 2nd. I didn’t give myself any concessions, although of course there were moments when motivation dropped and I wanted to quit everything, the success stories here on the site helped a lot, I promised myself then that I would definitely write my own, maybe it will help someone in a difficult moment to find strength in themselves and defeat the validator (restaurant and archiver, hello) + 20 years of experience in sports helped a lot here, did everything on schedule. On the weekend, my wife and daughter traveled by motorcycle around the nearest provinces of Thailand, enjoyed nature and weather. I rested to the maximum, this is also part of the work, although sometimes on weekends I sat down to code or a book on Java, when I was completely unbearable, but I tried to stick to the regime. Approximately after the new year, I was at the level of 25-30, then I decided that I’m all a cool programmer (actually not), it’s time to get a job, I made a resume on hh, applications poured in, again I won’t describe how I wrote it, but did it for a couple of weeks, and then regularly supplemented it, then translated it into English, designed everything in the best possible way, although there was no experience in programming, hrs obviously liked it, they actually wrote quite often. Naturally, the first few interviews brought me back to earth, I realized how much I still don’t know and what I know needed to be specifically structured, which I did. After that, the choice arose where to go Android or JavaEE tried the first, went through the HeadFirst book and wrote about 30 small projects in general, but then using one of the sites for learning English, I saw how cool their layout was for mobile and how badly the mobile application works. I thought about it and decided to learn JavaEE, looking ahead, I can say that I didn’t give up the idea of learning Android and now I plan to master it. Nevertheless, at that time he abandoned the idea of android. How long is short I started to learn related technologies that are required sql/maven/git/spring/hibernate and I’ll probably single out the rest architecture separately, they often ask about it and in general the first two of my projects that went into production are rest api. You need to know all this, everyone asks this, but you can know superficially, write 10 other small projects using them, for example, an internship assignment is actually written in half a day, a day, without a front, you don’t need it in Java, you can teach a little JS / React / Node, if you want to go to the front, but you can only learn them and not learn Java at all, there are a lot more jobs and customers, but they have their own specifics. In general, around May, I returned to Russia, because there were things to do here and I decided that it was time to get a job in the office, before that I had all the interviews via Skype (I never received an offer at that time) .. I was expecting much less at the time. Of course, I accepted the offer .. I want to dwell separately on the first months of work, for some reason few people write about them, but for me they were a real nightmare, I thought I would be fired to be honest. It was hellishly difficult, they gave me the task to immediately write my project, or rather part of the project, one micro service, but for me it was rather a huge monster, because I had to think through everything from the architecture and the frameworks used to exception handling. I was very nervous and thought that they expected me to do it all in a couple of weeks, which made it very difficult to focus on the task and make the right decisions. As a result, many thanks to my team leader, he helped me a lot, explained many basic things and didn’t put pressure on me at all. Of course one more thing helped me. After about two months of work, I was interviewed by another company where I was offered a salary that was one third higher than mine, I did not accept the offer, for a number of reasons, but nevertheless it greatly increased my self-esteem and confidence in the future as developer. Sorry for the long text, and thanks to everyone who read to the end. ps: I think with experience, I will supplement the article with small notes, if someone is interested in this writing of mine Addition #1 Thank you all for the comments, I'm glad that my scribble received so many responses. I tried to remove the typos that were mentioned in the comments, and do not judge too harshly for mistakes, we all make them. Now on business.
Everyone is concerned about the question of how you can afford it with an average salary. There are no special secrets, at one time the book "The Richest Man in Babylon" by Clason George helped me a lot. Further, if you are interested in the topic of financial literacy, there are quite a few books about this, probably this is a topic for a separate article.
How I made so many grammatical mistakes and became a programmer.
Not a single employer was worried about this issue, to be honest. But in the summary, of course, I tried not to do them and double-checked everything 10 times.
