It’s now 2019, I’m 29 years old, I’ve been working as a Java developer for 1.5 years now, writing in
Spring ,
Java EE , I know
Maven ,
Gradle Tomcat and many other Java-related titles.
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Finally got around to writing a short story about myself. Studying was a long time ago and it’s not true, since then I’ve learned a lot, I’ve already forgotten how it was, so I’ll tell you as I remember, but my memory is not very good. My story began in the fall of 2015, when I was looking for another programming language that I would like to learn and in which I could write under Linux Debian, which I still use to this day. I worked as a system administrator in a government office, and I realized that I didn’t want to continue my career at my current place of work and I didn’t want to continue doing network administration either. I was ready to go to a low-paying position, as long as it was interesting. My start consisted of intermediate English, higher technical education, one application for Microsoft Access in VBA, and unfinished attempts to learn C#. For the new year (from 2015 to 2016), I bought a subscription to JavaRush at a discount, and this is where my acquaintance with the world of Java began. I studied in bursts, I could complete a couple of levels in a couple of days, or I could take a break for a week or even a month, so my education was delayed. I studied in any free time, at work, after work, at night, when my daughter was born, and I study in this mode to this day. There are a lot of interesting things at work, but there are still many library frameworks and programming languages that I would like to try. From levels 6 to 30, I read “Thinking in Java” in parallel with JavaRush. After level 30 I read Effective Java, very often I was distracted from the course by video lessons from Golovach and others and by writing my own simple applications in Java. In the fall of 2016, a significant event took place for me, after which I decided that I would definitely become a Java developer. I was somewhere at level 25 in JavaRush, and somehow during a get-together in a pub it turned out that a friend of mine worked as a Java developer at a company and they were looking for a junior. Naturally, I went to the interview without hesitation; I may not have answered very well, but partly because I belonged, I was offered a job. But this is not the end of the story. I had obligations at my current job, so I declined the offer, but I don’t regret it, because there was still a lot to learn. At that time, apart from having somewhat studied Java Core, I did not know any libraries, frameworks, or assembly tools. Do you know by what means Java applications are assembled? How does a library differ from a framework? And then everything flew very quickly and as if in a fog. After all the inspiring events, at the beginning of 2017 I enrolled in the topjava course (javaops.ru, I think it would be wrong to call it a “
JavaRush internship”"), got acquainted with Tomcat Maven and Spring, and by the end of the course I started going for interviews. By June 2017, I had attended 7 interviews, half of which resulted in job offers. My joy knew no bounds; I chose one place that I liked the most and where I work to this day. My salary more than doubled from the first day of work. I consider myself a good developer. Now writing an application or learning a new programming language is not something impossible and complicated, but simply an interesting task. I can’t say that my story is somehow indicative, I’m a completely ordinary person, and even with a good technical background. For me, becoming a Java developer was a natural step forward and I never regret it, I really like everything: colleagues, the Java world, interesting work, conferences. I wish you success and achieving your goals!
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