Have you ever wanted to have an impact on another person’s life? How about whole groups of people? Without aggrandizing too much, that’s exactly what a developer does. Developers create the software and related technologies that impact our everyday lives.

I come to development by way of education, another field that has a high impact on the everyday lives of people. I’ve been a teacher, an educator, for quite some time. My career has spanned the secondary and tertiary levels, and at one point, I hoped to segue into a career in international education after working abroad and concentrating on related projects.

However, within the last few years my priorities and interests have shifted. The shift began before the Covid pandemic, but became more necessary as a result of it. Having the time to begin exploring interests I had shoved to the side was suddenly essential to my well-being. One of those interests was learning to code, something I had been intending to do for several years.

Before learning to code, I didn’t really grasp what it meant to be a developer. I didn’t know that not only were there many coding languages, there were also frameworks and libraries to learn. I didn’t understand that there was more to software or a website than the client interface, and that the interface was there to assist the user. I just thought it would be really fun and interesting to be able to impact others in a positive way through code. I was right, but there was a steep learning curve along the way!

Once I had decided to embrace this shift in focus, I began researching bootcamps and trying out different coding courses online. I won’t go into that research here; it deserves its own blog post. However, I settled on attending an online, part-time bootcamp to develop my skills.

Although I haven’t started down this path yet, one of the projects I would like to develop would be creating engaging educational games and experiences that would assist students in learning. For the moment, however, I am working on honing my skills as a full-stack developer, and now with this debut post, technical blogger.