Started building my startup

When everyone in the class was planning to become programmers, I, succumbing to my romantic ideas about medicine, decided to become a doctor. An important role was played by the fact that my family could not afford a computer back in 2001. Computer science lessons were clearly not enough to communicate with the computer on a first-name basis. I remember in the 10th grade, during a school internship, I was assigned to help the school secretary and there I was given the task of editing a floppy disk with a file containing some important data. So I couldn’t open this program for several days, and in the end they asked a school computer science teacher to do the work. Then I learned for myself for many years that doing something on a computer is VERY difficult. When I started working as a doctor , I constantly had problems making diagnoses (in fact, all my work was one continuous problem). I always tried to look for answers and help in articles and books from the Internet, but I did not always find what I needed or very late. 6 years ago I had my first attack of desire to create a program for making diagnoses. I didn’t have the money to pay professionals to create the program. But I had a penchant for exact sciences, and I decided to study programming on my own on the Internet. I started studying the first C++ site that caught my eye . At the same time, I was reading some ancient textbooks on computer science. And that time it lasted me for 3 months, until I came across ready-made diagnosis sites (symptom checkers) on the Internet. Amazed by their level, I realized that I had nothing to catch here and gave up this idea. It was also possible that they let me go because maternity leave was approaching and I turned my attention to my family life. Coming out of maternity leave, I again plunged headlong into the apocalypse that was happening in medicine. Due to family circumstances, I was unable to leave the small town where I had been assigned to do my free residency. The prospect of staying at a job I didn’t like for the rest of my life depressed me more than ever. And then my old idea began to intensify - to write my own medical program. I was 30 years old in 2015. This time I approached the choice of language more meaningfully . I looked at what was in demand, what was praised, where they were paid. And I chose Java . I read a couple of books a la “Java for dummies, beginners, children, grandmothers in 30 days.” And I didn’t feel like a programmer one bit. Again I went to sites with educational articles about Java, repeating everything step by step. That's when I first saw JavaRush, solved the free levels; paying money for a subscription seemed wasteful to me then. I heard out of the blue that in programming a lot of things still consist of stolen code, crutches and bicycles, so I decided that I had mastered Java at the required level and moved on to the next stage. I spent a couple of months learning CLIPS , a language for writing expert systems. For some reason, it didn’t bother me then that no one had been interested in this language for decades. When I wrote a small algorithm in CLIPS, all I had to do was attach it to a website, and I would already have my own completed project. But the only lessons on how to do this turned out to be videos in Spanish from YouTube. In general, at that moment, it dawned on me that in order to write what I had in mind, I would have to immerse myself in programming headlong . In medicine there is a huge problem with obtaining practical skills. Studying on patients can be legally dangerous, and institutes never have money for simulators and phantoms. Therefore, unfortunate doctors are taught simply from books and posters. Sometimes you can still stand in the ward and have an oral conversation with the patients. And this vicious system, first stuffing my head full of theory and only after many years applying this store of knowledge in practice, has become firmly entrenched in my head. I... was afraid to write code... What if I made a mistake?! It is clear that the mistake of a doctor and a programmer is heaven and earth, but the wrong attitude had already been developed in my head and I had to somehow overcome the fear of writing code. And then I remembered about JavaRush . Having looked at it as a way to make me more familiar with the development environment, I finally decided to fork out the cash and purchase a subscription with an internship. The saga with the validator lasted about three months. And it even gave me some pleasure. My friends, having learned about my hobby, were perplexed by what was happening. But other people's success stories urged us not to lose heart and crawl to the end. And I crawled towards my dream. Level 30 was achieved with grief in half. I was able to open a test assignment for an internship! And for the next six months... I tried to solve it every day. Six months, Karl! I finally did it and was accepted. I felt like almost a programming demigod for the first week. It seemed to me that this is how the ugly duckling felt when he found out that he turned out to be a beautiful swan. When I was just walking with my daughter, my fingers missed the keyboard, and in my dreams I typed some kind of code. But when the internship began, I again felt like a complete insignificance. The amount of information turned out to be enormous. I completed my first internship up to the 3rd lesson. The second one was until I was 6 or 7, and at the third internship I felt that I would hate programming if I didn’t finally start writing what I had in mind. And I started.. Fortunately, the knowledge gained from the internship turned out to be enough to create the framework of my own application. I had to study a lot on my own (most of it in English), shed half a liter of tears and even read a few prayers. And at the end of October 2018, I finally deployed my mvp to the server. Sympathizers may be curious: etiona.com When I got involved in this whole business, I didn’t even know about the existence of such a word - startup. And even more so, it turns out that 95% will fail in the first years. But let time put everything in its place and give me a chance to test myself. Perhaps my story will be read by a dreamer like me. And, remembering his unrealized ideas, he decides to create something of his own, which the world has not yet seen and will not see for a long time without his participation. Programming provides incredible opportunities for this. You, even being confined to your room in a small provincial town, get a chance to find a decent income and become part of a huge community of intelligent people. The entry threshold is minimal: a computer, preferably with an Internet connection, your time and perseverance. Well, okay, and some money for a subscription to JavaRush, since we’re all here anyway. Compared to what you need to do to become a doctor, this is sheer nonsense. Rays of light and goodness to everyone! May we all succeed! The main thing is to believe in yourself!