How I Went From Street Food Vendor to Top Tech Companies Part 1

We bring to your attention a translation of the article by Alvaro Videla How I went from selling food in the street to working for top firms in tech . She talks about the attempts of the author of "Enter IT". It was more than 10 years ago, and the Uruguayan realities of that time surprisingly resemble those in the very part of the world where the vast majority of CodeGym students live. So read the article, and do not forget to solve problems. We think you will notice how much easier it has become to learn programming on your own compared to 2006! In this series of articles I want to share with you how I got into the world of programming. I never studied information technology at the university, I found another way. At the end of 2006, I found myself in a very difficult life situation. My hopes of becoming a high school linguistics teacher vanished overnight. Severe circumstances have developed in such a way that the continuation of my studies turned out to be impossible. I returned to my hometown of Durasno in Uruguay. My wife worked long hours for a meager salary of $160 a month. Yes, that's $1920 a year. We sacrificed the time we could spend together so that I could graduate and get a better paying job. Of course, we dreamed of a better life. But dreams remained dreams. Since things didn't go according to plan, I had to return to my hometown to think about my next steps. Should I say that I was depressed and the life circumstances in which I found myself oppressed me even more. I was glad to see my wife again, but I would like it to happen for a different reason. Among other things, we lived with my wife's aunt, so our personal space was limited to the bedroom, and outside of it we felt like long-delayed guests. In order to get at least some additional income, we sold food on the street, cooked by ourselves. I had to go to the neighbors and collect orders for the weekend. “Hi, would you like to eat our ravioli on Sunday?” So I asked over and over again. “Yes, of course, they are handmade. Wait a bit and we will deliver them to you. And, having collected orders, on the weekends we sculpted a couple of thousand ravioli to earn 500 pesos (that's about $ 20). And that's not counting the costs. The situation was terrible. We felt hopeless. My wife worked hard all week, and on the weekends she helped me make ravioli. She didn't even have one day off for herself. She begged me to stop making those ravioli, even if it meant we would have less money to pay the bills. In the end, I agreed, but this meant that I had to find a job, and this is not so easy to do in our small town. I was overcome with anxiety and despair. I once spoke to a friend of mine who was studying computer engineering at the University of Montevideo. He told me about job opportunities in the capital with salaries that seemed like the ultimate dream for a provincial resident. “There is a big company in Montevideo - Live Interactive. They are always looking for programmers, they pay excellent. Perhaps you can find a job with them,” a friend told me. The salary he mentioned was three times our income, and I kept thinking about what we could afford with that much money. We wouldn't have to worry about what we're having for lunch anymore. We could pay for the Internet, buy normal clothes and shoes, and even afford a washing machine! In addition, I already had experience with computers. I have always enjoyed working with them, mainly because that I was able to solve problems with their help. Programming reminded me of cracking code or finding the solution to a tricky puzzle—these were challenging tasks, and I enjoyed them a lot. Moreover, I understood how programming could be promising for my career. But there was one small problem: to work as a programmer, you need to understand how to program. I could install Linux myself, but that was the limit of my IT abilities. you need to understand how to program. I could install Linux myself, but that was the limit of my IT abilities. you need to understand how to program. I could install Linux myself, but that was the limit of my IT abilities. How can you get a job as a programmer with no experience and no higher education diploma? How to learn programming without the Internet at home, without mentors and access to specialized literature? This was my problem in 2006 and here's how I solved it.

First attempts

I have been interested in computers since I was young. Mostly when I visited my friend who had his own computer. We mostly spent time playing video games, but I can't say that they particularly interested me. Why? When I entered high school, my friend's father allowed us to use his ZX Spectrum. He had a stack of cassettes of games for him and we could play any of them, but one day he showed me something that really surprised me - people can create their own games using programming! He showed me some tricks in BASIC, like how you can generate random numbers using the RAND function. It struck me. At that moment, I realized that the computer is much more than the famous Nintendo with a keyboard. You can make it do things for you - really cool stuff like, draw lines using trigonometric functions and then color them using random colors. You can even make music by passing different frequencies to BEEP. One day I brought the Spectrum home and spent the whole day playing beeps on my TV. Mom, as you know, was delighted ... How can you get a job as a programmer with no experience and no higher education diploma? Later, in my youth, I still spent time with friends who had personal computers and, of course, we mostly played games. In the meantime, my more tech buddies taught me some operating system tricks, mostly MS-DOS. From time to time, we tried to program in BASIC, copying character by character bits of code we saw in old computer magazines. Then they seemed to us magic spells, or rather, technical spells. It was especially cool to edit the text that popped up in different situations during the game. We felt like cool hackers! In the early 2000s, I managed to convince my grandfather to buy a computer. It was a Pentium MMX with 32 RAM - incredible cool! I first installed Linux on it using the SUSE CD that came with an Argentine computer magazine as a bonus. I've spent a lot of time experimenting with various Linux distributions, getting familiar with the command line, and so on. But I've never been into programming. When I remember those times, I still can't understand why didn’t I study C programming at that time, and didn’t master any programming language at all. A friend even offered me that programming bible, Kernighan and Ritchie's Programming in C, so not having access to a manual doesn't excuse me. Then I analyzed only a few examples, but programming didn’t arouse much interest in me at that moment, because I didn’t understand how it could be useful to me in life. In those years, I just played with Linux, and nothing more. Then I had odd jobs, I played in a rock band, tried to become a language teacher, got married and traveled around the country with my wife. And so, after the aforementioned conversation with a friend, in November 2006, I was on fire to get into that very company in Montevideo. But for this I had to meet its requirements, and I decided to become a reliable programmer. and did not master any programming language at all. A friend even offered me that programming bible, Kernighan and Ritchie's Programming in C, so not having access to a manual doesn't excuse me. Then I analyzed only a few examples, but programming didn’t arouse much interest in me at that moment, because I didn’t understand how it could be useful to me in life. In those years, I just played with Linux, and nothing more. Then I had odd jobs, I played in a rock band, tried to become a language teacher, got married and traveled around the country with my wife. And so, after the aforementioned conversation with a friend, in November 2006, I was on fire to get into that very company in Montevideo. But for this I had to meet its requirements, and I decided to become a reliable programmer. and did not master any programming language at all. A friend even offered me that programming bible, Kernighan and Ritchie's Programming in C, so not having access to a manual doesn't excuse me. Then I analyzed only a few examples, but programming didn’t arouse much interest in me at that moment, because I didn’t understand how it could be useful to me in life. In those years, I just played with Linux, and nothing more. Then I had odd jobs, I played in a rock band, tried to become a language teacher, got married and traveled around the country with my wife. And so, after the aforementioned conversation with a friend, in November 2006, I was on fire to get into that very company in Montevideo. But for this I had to meet its requirements, and I decided to become a reliable programmer. A friend even offered me that programming bible, Kernighan and Ritchie's Programming in C, so not having access to a manual doesn't excuse me. Then I analyzed only a few examples, but programming didn’t arouse much interest in me at that moment, because I didn’t understand how it could be useful to me in life. In those years, I just played with Linux, and nothing more. Then I had odd jobs, I played in a rock band, tried to become a language teacher, got married and traveled around the country with my wife. And so, after the aforementioned conversation with a friend, in November 2006, I was on fire to get into that very company in Montevideo. But for this I had to meet its requirements, and I decided to become a reliable programmer. A friend even offered me that programming bible, Kernighan and Ritchie's Programming in C, so not having access to a manual doesn't excuse me. Then I analyzed only a few examples, but programming didn’t arouse much interest in me at that moment, because I didn’t understand how it could be useful to me in life. In those years, I just played with Linux, and nothing more. Then I had odd jobs, I played in a rock band, tried to become a language teacher, got married and traveled around the country with my wife. And so, after the aforementioned conversation with a friend, in November 2006, I was on fire to get into that very company in Montevideo. But for this I had to meet its requirements, and I decided to become a reliable programmer. so the lack of access to the manual does not exonerate me. Then I analyzed only a few examples, but programming didn’t arouse much interest in me at that moment, because I didn’t understand how it could be useful to me in life. In those years, I just played with Linux, and nothing more. Then I had odd jobs, I played in a rock band, tried to become a language teacher, got married and traveled around the country with my wife. And so, after the aforementioned conversation with a friend, in November 2006, I was on fire to get into that very company in Montevideo. But for this I had to meet its requirements, and I decided to become a reliable programmer. so the lack of access to the manual does not exonerate me. Then I analyzed only a few examples, but programming didn’t arouse much interest in me at that moment, because I didn’t understand how it could be useful to me in life. In those years, I just played with Linux, and nothing more. Then I had odd jobs, I played in a rock band, tried to become a language teacher, got married and traveled around the country with my wife. And so, after the aforementioned conversation with a friend, in November 2006, I was on fire to get into that very company in Montevideo. But for this I had to meet its requirements, and I decided to become a reliable programmer. In those years, I just played with Linux, and nothing more. Then I had odd jobs, I played in a rock band, tried to become a language teacher, got married and traveled around the country with my wife. And so, after the aforementioned conversation with a friend, in November 2006, I was on fire to get into that very company in Montevideo. But for this I had to meet its requirements, and I decided to become a reliable programmer. In those years, I just played with Linux, and nothing more. Then I had odd jobs, I played in a rock band, tried to become a language teacher, got married and traveled around the country with my wife. And so, after the aforementioned conversation with a friend, in November 2006, I was on fire to get into that very company in Montevideo. But for this I had to meet its requirements, and I decided to become a reliable programmer.

Time to set goals

Since I wanted to be hired, the first thing I had to do was to assess the level of my programming skills. And evaluate honestly in order to understand what to focus on. At the time, I knew a little about ActionSpirit for Flash MX and the very beginnings of PHP. Earlier that year, learning these things became my hobby. The project to learn programming became my brainchild in the hope that it could become my alternative source of income in the future. I came up with the idea of ​​creating a digital map of my city, where the user could mark the locations of businesses, shops and other places of interest to him. I could charge companies in exchange for their appearance on my map, my online application. I know what you're thinking. “It's just Google Maps,” you say. It is, but all Google knew about my hometown in 2006 was that it was crossed by a large highway. So my map seemed like a pretty good idea at the time. Plus, I thought this project would be a good way to showcase my skills to a potential employer. I had a clear understanding of what I wanted to do, I just had to pull myself together and make an effort. At the end of 2006, I set a deadline for myself: by February 2007, I had to have a working application concept. It was supposed to include a Flash frontend, a PHP backend with a MySQL connection to serve the data. I decided to plan everything clearly, to separate important problems from minor ones, because time was ticking inexorably: every day my wife worked irregular hours to earn our living. In addition, I needed to make potential employers understand that I was good at these technologies, otherwise I would not have been able to get a job. Naturally, I had nothing to write on my resume, so I had to create my knowledge base from scratch, and my application would serve as a demonstration of my programming skills. My main goal was to get an interview at the company my friend was talking about and, thanks to my skills and application, eventually get a job.

Learning Project: Mapping Application

The app I created was called Aleph Maps- A reference to Jorge Luis Borges' short story "Aleph", which tells of a place on the planet where the past, present and future converge. Not very clear, right? But in order to bring this idea to life, I needed to learn how to program web applications. The absence of the Internet at home is a serious test for the developer. When I started out, ADSL broadband access was still largely non-existent, only available to businesses and possibly wealthy families. For average households, an internet connection meant a slow dial-up connection for a lot of money. I couldn't afford it and had to bother my friends whenever I needed to read an online PHP tutorial. That is, despite the presence of a computer and the desire to learn, I did not have free access to information. Since there was a catastrophic lack of normal Internet in the city, Internet cafes began to appear everywhere. They charged 50 cents an hour for their services. It seemed to me a much better option than sitting on the head of my comrades. But at the same time, this meant that I had to find a free half dollar and a couple of floppy disks in order to work for an hour in an Internet cafe, have time to find the information I needed, copy it and continue studying at home already at my computer. Perhaps those who remember floppy disks are reading this, those hellishly unreliable storage media: you come home, you try to take information from them, but they are already damaged ... Imagine how angry I was: I wasted my time and lost 50 cents for nothing. Half dollar! Back then, a dollar could buy a burger or a bottle of beer. For my family, this was a significant amount: we could buy milk or bread with that money. At the time, my daily job consisted of trying to get from point A to point B. Some of the tasks weren't all that difficult, and I felt like I was making progress. And sometimes it seemed to me that all this was a road to nowhere. Here, for example, I need to implement the function “enter new information into the database”. If the task sounds like this, it means that I need to describe everything I need to do to achieve this - from writing an SQL INSERT statement to executing it using PHP, and then integrating it all into my application. for example, I need to implement the "enter new information into the database" function. If the task sounds like this, it means that I need to describe everything I need to do to achieve this - from writing an SQL INSERT statement to executing it using PHP, and then integrating it all into my application. for example, I need to implement the "enter new information into the database" function. If the task sounds like this, it means that I need to describe everything I need to do to achieve this - from writing an SQL INSERT statement to executing it using PHP, and then integrating it all into my application. Every day, going to an Internet cafe, I set myself a certain task. I took floppy disks with me and searched Google for useful blogs, articles, tutorials - anything that would help me find the right solutions. As soon as I found everything I needed, I saved it to floppy disks and went home in the hope that my computer's disk drive would deign to read the saved data. Anxiety ate at me whenever I rode my bike home. “What if there is no data at all?” I thought. “But what if the bike shakes a lot, and now I come home with empty floppy disks? I really don’t have an extra dollar to go back to the cafe today, so it would be better if everything was safe at home.” Needless to say, this was completely inappropriate. I would return home and complete one task, thanks to the information I brought with me, but I lacked the knowledge for the next step. I was just waiting for a new day when I could again take 50 cents from the family budget and go to a cafe. And although at that time it seemed to me the only option, I understood that it was necessary to change the strategy. I needed something that contained more information on how to create a web application with PHP and Flash MX, with tutorials explaining how to do the most basic tasks, all in one place. Not the Internet, but books! It seems obvious, but in fact, everything is not so easy here. The problem is that when you are a marginalized part of society, then access to books is also limited. The closest thing you can find to programming in a library is a How To Fix Your Computer manual, a dusty MS-DOS manual, or perhaps an old BASIC or Delphi tome, if you are very lucky. But no more. But you can buy books, right? Not really. In the bookstores of most provincial towns in Uruguay, technical literature is simply not for sale. And my city was no exception. In addition, most technical books, especially those on advanced technology, are written in English. It is useless to look for them in small bookstores. And in the end, I was left with only one option - Amazon. But here, too, difficulties arose. To buy a book on Amazon, you need a small piece of plastic called a credit card. And to get it, at that time you needed a positive credit history. For most people, this is not a problem, but in my case it was not at all like that: everything we bought was paid for in cash. We had neither the money nor the economic stability to participate in any credit histories. We didn't take loans. If we wanted to buy anything in excess of our monthly income, we either saved month after month until we had enough money or borrowed money from relatives. In addition, even if we could buy the book on Amazon, shipping to Uruguay would cost the same as the book itself and take about a month. Sometimes the solutions to problems are closer than we think. In the end, we decided to turn to the family for help. My wife has an aunt who lived in America for a while, and we decided to ask her for help in getting some books for me. One day I plucked up the courage to write her a letter explaining my situation, hit send, and crossed my fingers praying to all the gods in the hope that she would help us. A few days later there was a new letter in my inbox. It was her answer, strictly to the point: "Tell me what books you need, and I'll order them on Amazon." I decided to ask for "Flash MX User Bible" and "PHP 5" and "MySQL User Bible". These books proved incredibly helpful and indispensable in the weeks that followed. Now I could find solutions to current problems without visiting Internet cafes in search of missing information. I could finally understand what exactly do I need to know to create my mapping application. And finally, when I have all the necessary information at hand, it's time to sit down at the computer and get to work. I hope you enjoyed the first part. INIn the next chapter , I will tell you about how I prepared to get a job, and how the interview went. Note: The main illustration you see above was created by my friend Sebastian Navas. If you want to see more of his work, then go here , or contact him on Facebook