My path to a change
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I got my first job as a bagger at Kroger when I was sixteen years old. Since then all my jobs have been in either retail or food service. I turned 40 last October. That means I have been working in the toxic customer service industry for twenty-four years. I've decided I'm ready for a change.
Since I was a kid I've been fascinated with codes and ciphers. While I know that computer cryptography is far superior to anything that uses pencil and paper (other than a one-time pad) I still enjoy doing ciphers by hand. A few months ago I came across the VIC cipher, which most consider was the most complicated hand cipher ever used in the field. I played with it for a while, encoding and decoding messages to myself, but realized I could write a program to encode messages for me to decode. Yes, this sounds fun to me. My coding skills are a decade or so out of date, so I bought the newest edition of my favorite programming book, JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and started reading up.
At the same time, I was hired at Starbucks. They paid for me to go to collage. I had been wanting to go to collage since I was a kid but life kept getting in the way. I decided that I was going to make a change in my life to get out of this industry. Starbucks didn't work out, but the motivation has stayed with me. I have completed the Responsive Web Design Certification at freeCodeCamp. I've been watching YouTube videos and reading articles on how to break into a career as a developer.
I'm getting out of customer service jobs. I'm committed to learning all I can and improving my life. And I'm going to post updates of what I'm learning and doing along the way.