My journey began in late 2016. I was having a long vacation after graduating from my high-school. I was looking for a passion at that time. All I could do is gaming, card magic tricks, and wasting time on social media. My brother suggested to me to learn Programming. I had plenty of time in my hand so I decided to give it a try.
First Steps
After some research, I decided that I want to be a web developer. So I started learning HTML & CSS. I didn't have any computer back then to practice coding. I used my android phone to start learning. I started watching tutorials on YouTube. I got a lot of insights from those tutorials. I will be forever in debt to those content creators. Then, after getting some confidence, I bought a laptop and started becoming a programmer.
My love for coding was increasing day by day. It wasn't long before coding became my passion. I knew that I will be happy with programming for the rest of my life. I also kept thinking about starting a career in Programming. I was facing some financial issues at that time. Programming helped me a lot. It gave me opportunities that I wouldn't have in near future.
Starting back-end
After learning JavaScript, I started doing PHP. Laravel was my target from the beginning. Laravel was much-hyped at that time. After getting a good idea of Object-Oriented Programming, I jumped into Laravel tutorials.
Starting Career
After getting a good grasp of Laravel, I decided to start freelancing. The best way to gain experience is to take challenges and work on real-life projects. Of course, I worked on some personal projects with Laravel before starting freelancing.
I got a couple of projects from Upwork and Fiverr. The clients were very good and the projects were very helpful to me to grow myself. I started sending my resume to the local companies. After a month or two, I got my first interview. It did go well but wasn't enough. I was a very introverted teenager at that time and couldn't speak much about myself at the interview. After 1 month, I got another call. And that interview went very well. They also took a programming test, which I did quite well, I believe. So, that was my very first job. Started in September 2017.
My third job
Joining LightCastle Partners in January 2018 was a big turning point in my life. Before joining this company, I was working on just small-scale projects. I got many chances to work on complex, challenging tasks in this company. The colleagues were just awesome. I had a lot of good laughs with them.
I left LightCastle in August 2018.
Afterwards
I joined another company and worked with them for a year. The colleagues were kind of boring. I couldn't develop my skills much in that company. The main advantage of this job was, the office was very close to my home. So I could give more time to my college.
After that, I joined the World University of Bangladesh as a Software Programmer (not as a student). I developed some good skills while working there. I learned Android App Development with Android Studio. I could finally call myself a full-stack developer.
Throughout my career, I have learned a lot of things and struggled a lot to make myself a better programmer. I still have a lot of things to learn. I want to explore the machine learning world very soon.
Some Mistakes
Although I won't call it a mistake, it did some harm to my career. In 2020, I started gaming. A lot. I wanted to have some extreme entertainment. I used to play Minecraft, Call of Duty for hours. With that, my learning was stopped for some months. But I recovered from my gaming addiction and went back to the tech world again.
Some Lessons
The best lesson I have learned from my career would be: You never learn enough. There is always something left to learn, some skills left to master, some new frameworks left to learn about. I'm not that qualified to give much advice on Programming.
All I would say is Stay Focused Everyday. Never lose focus. Keep grinding!
This is the first blog post I've written in my life. So don't mind some writing mistakes. I wish I started blogging earlier