I am a 16 year who loves to transform ideas into reality using code. The path of a self-taught developer can be scary and intimidating. For me, getting into code turned out to be the right choice anyways: When the responsibility for your growth, career and learning sits 100% on your own shoulders, you also completely own your wins. Here’s my story and what I learned.
Ever since I was a kid I was fascinated with technology. Growing up, I used to play with any old computer equipment I could get my hands on. One of my greatest joys was poking around in old hard drives.
During High School, my interest in development really took off but I also dreamed about launching my own business.That’s why I began to teach myself web design by watching youtube videos. As I continued I got even more intrested so I also explored backend then mobile...
Like any teenager, I started thinking about my life post-high school from about the age of 13. I had quite strong feelings against studying, especially because I felt like I was making some sort of progress in life already. On the other hand, however, I also had the inkling that society generally supported, encouraged and even required a university degree to get anywhere in life. My biggest worry was that I wouldn’t be able to get a job without a piece of paper that declared my competency.
Despite this fear and many people telling me that I wouldn’t be able to survive, I ended up deciding not to go study: To a large degree, it was probably because of this tiny, stubborn spark of “I’ll show you” deep within me. However, I also felt that I had already learned and experienced quite a lot on my own and many traditional courses in programming seemed like they would cover what I already knew. I am worried that I would be bored and then quit
Every new project and endeavour showed me the gaps in my skill set. I decided to push really hard to fill them with online courses on sites like freecodecamp. I kept building small apps to practice.
This is probably one of the biggest things that I had to face, and it’s something I still deal with albeit far less frequently. All of a sudden surrounded by developers with degrees, I felt as though everything I knew was “fake” or less valuable in some way: I experienced extreme imposter syndrome symptoms. I felt that I couldn’t hold my own in technical conversations because I somehow wasn’t qualified to contribute and that anything I would say would be wrong.