My name is Samuel Olubiyo, and I am a struggling developer but not for the reasons you might think. My developer journey began 5 years ago, I was in my second year at University and we were introduced to our very first programming language: JavaScript. We need to know a little HTML or else we would look silly trying to make anything happen in the browser, and only a little HTML is what we were taught. Nobody mentioned anything about CSS, or maybe they did and I wasn't paying attention, the point is, we were mostly concerned about JavaScript and so we learned that in-depth. Now, before this point, I have always had a mild interest in the web, of course, I knew HTML and CSS is very important, but I never paid much attention to them, I never even bothered to learn until we were introduced to JavaScript in school, and when I started learning HTML and CSS it was to complete my JavaScript assignments to make them look cool. As soon as we were done with the JavaScript course, the next programming language we were introduced to is (you won't believe it) Java.
Java of all things! I don't know which of the geniuses in charge of our coursework decided that the next language after introductory JavaScript is Java, but one of the things I learned from this experience is that it's a bad idea to learn Java and JavaScript at the same time. The problem I have as a person is that I am very ambitious, but I lack the inherent skills to pull off the many ideas that flash across my mind. True, I tend to have genius ideas, but I am not a programming genius. Not yet.
Thus, by the middle of my third year, I was knee-deep in Java syntax and have completely forgotten about JavaScript. Why? Because I dreamed to become an android developer and Java was the popular language for android development at that time, I haven't even heard of Kotlin or Flutter, so I am not sure if it was popular at that time. I didn't even consider the fact that JavaScript can also be used for android development, that is why I wasted time learning Java and never mastered it. As time went on, I had a new ambition, to be a game developer, it never occurred to me that JavaScript can still be used for game development so I started learning C++, I failed to master that too and even stopped programming for a while. Later, I realized that JavaScript is the best language for me and I tried to start learning again but tragedy struck-- My hard drive crashed, and being a dumb ass as I am, I never backed up my files, I have heard of GitHub but I didn't even know what it was used for talkless of committing my projects. By the time I got a new hard drive, Python rose in popularity over JavaScript in the rankings, and guess what? I started learning Python.
Now, I am in my final year and the reality of life has started settling into my bones. I know I need a job in tech because that's one of the two jobs I can be fulfilled doing, the other is writing fantasy novels. So far, I have been a jack of all trades and a master of none, but I have learned and matured over the years, I now know what I must do, so I humbly went back to the basics and began learning HTML5 and CSS3**, I now realized I have quite a knack for it unlike Java and C++, I also realized that all my major ambitions could be rolled into these two languages:
Front-end development Game development (there are HTML5 game engines!)
Of course, I know at some point, I still have to learn JavaScript and its famous libraries like React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, Ionic, etc. but I am taking things slowly. I still occasionally get tempted by Python, but I am taking things as slowly as I can and learning as fast as I dare.
With the Metaverse and Blockchain technology taking the world by storm, I sometimes feel like a loser, but then I have to remind myself that there is still time if a forty-year-old man can learn enough to get a career in tech within six months, what can't I do? I'm not even 25 yet! But then I'll log in to Tech Twitter to see 18-year-olds building amazing projects that I could only dream of and I'll feel like a loser again. All in all, I am struggling with myself, not with coding.