A chance to learn

Something that I have learnt while in this new career is that perceiving making mistakes as a bad and scary thing to do, is completely the wrong way to look at it. I'm going to make mistakes, no matter how good I can get, or how much study I can put in, it will happen. Realising that a mistake made is a great opportunity to learn from is one of the best things that I have come to understand over the past 10 months being here and starting from the beginning. Yes you might feel a bit shit when you have to make a hotfix to sort out some of your code that went live - even though you thought you had tested it as much as you could, however, it is far from the end of the world. Take the opportunity and make notes about it, write down ways you could have avoided it or anything you can think of that will help you in the future. Doing things like this, over time will amount such valuable learning, that it is almost a mistake to not make mistakes. These things will happen and there is no point in trying to hide from it, or punish yourself mentally because of it. Just smile and look forward to the next chance you get to learn!

Goals for the new year

It's always good to set yourself goals, no matter how small and simple they are. It gives you something to go after and keeps you motivated to reach those targets. It can also give you a measure of how far you have come since setting yourself these goals. My main goal for this year is to learn typescript. I think it is something that will compliment my current learning extremely well. When I started at Shift I was mainly just backend, focusing on php - however over the months I have moved onto incorporating frontend work too, and I am loving being able to fully work on both the backend and the frontend and be able to see tasks through with a complete overview of both aspects of it. I have been learning bits of dart/flutter on the side also which I will continue to do, mainly so I can help out my current tribe with an overview for PR's etc if needed. Node.js is something I would like to have a play around with later in the year - I don't want to get too overwhelmed with learning too much right now, so I will continue to focus on laravel/react/react native as I am absolutely loving this combo, and I think for now some typescript will be great to just have under my belt.

My 6 month update

Wow, just how quickly this first 6 months have gone. I have now been working as a junior software developer at a company called Shift in Plymouth for 6 1/2 months. The time has absolutely flown by. It seems so strange to now think about working as a gas engineer at the start of the year.

Without a doubt it's been one of the best decisions I have ever made to make this change, to now be able to do something every day and enjoy it this much is amazing. I don't think I have felt like I have actually been "at work" for a single day yet. So many opportunities to learn and further my knowledge on a daily basis. I couldn't ask for a better team of people to be learning from, everyone has so much knowledge and is always so willing to help and give little tips and advice, it's just an awesome environment to work in.

I am still ofcourse very far from where I want to be, but that will come in time. It's crazy to look back and see how far I have progressed over this time.

My first month

I have now been working as a junior software developer at a company called Shift for my first month. Their main office is based in Plymouth, so it's only a 20-minute walk for me from home which is amazing (I've also been very fortunate with the weather so far!).

It has been an incredible experience and has just fueled my desire even more to try and become one of the best in my field. I think the hardest part so far has just been getting my head around the whole system, as compared to what I've been working on myself, it is so vast.

I have an amazing team to work with and everyone is incredibly helpful. I absolutely love it, and I cannot wait to see how much I can grow here. I wish I had made this move into the industry 10 years ago but never-mind, I'm doing it now, and I'm going to work my butt off. We all have to start somewhere.

Taking a leap

So after 12 years of being a plumber/heating engineer it finally came the time this week for me to hand in my notice.

Since starting to study software development last year I had been wanting to start looking for positions at the beginning of 2022 to make the career change. So the time had come to begin looking and be able to get a job where I can further my learning at an even faster pace being able to do it daily in a real world environment.

I have now been given an amazing opportunity to join a great company in Plymouth where I will be able to make this dream come true. I will be starting in March and I cannot wait to see where this takes me. It is a terrifying thing to be changing career completely but the excitement dwarfs that feeling and I am looking forward to becoming a worthy addition to their team and being able to grow with them and make amazing contributions to their work over the coming years.

Onwards!

Why can't I comment on youtube videos??

The question I had been pulling my hair out for days trying to figure out. Every time I would go to click on the comment section to attempt a comment it would instantly re-direct me to the youtube homepage with no other message.

I had done multiple searches trying to find a reason or answer to this and it wasn't until I tried commenting on my phone that it actually gave me an error message which I could finally Google. It turns out that my Google account didn't have my name set so as a default it was using my email as a name, which in turn didn't allow me to comment on any video.

So simple yet so frustrating.

Another highly recommended book

I've been reading many finance books over the past couple of years trying to learn more about investing and the stock market.

This book "The Millionaire Next Door" doesn't teach you about stocks or investing but rather about how so many people in the world these days are always trying to show off and impress everyone else by buying so much expensive stuff just trying to show how much money they have. When in reality behind the scenes they are much worse off than a tonne of people because they have so much on credit or such an expensive lifestyle that they have to keep getting more and more, and if they were to lose a job then they have such little net worth set aside they are screwed.

Compare that to more "secret" millionaires that don't feel the need to buy all the latest designer items or expensive cars and instead use their money wisely to make sure they have assets and not liabilities. Their net worths are so vast in comparison and it wouldn't matter if they suddenly lost their job etc as most of them are self employed or have businesses anyway but their net worth can easily cover years or decades of their lifestyles.

The true meaning of being wealthy is not just how much money you earn or spend, it's how long you can survive if you lost your job tomorrow with the money/assets you have.