I remember when my father brought home our family's first PC. It was 1989. I was five years old. My only exposure to computers was the ATARI 2600 and NES my brothers would never give me a chance to play. Imagine my excitement when they wanted next to nothing to do with this hulking, beige monstrosity with a monitor that was 30 lbs heavier than it had any right being.

Whenever my father would let me mess around on it, I was there, typing away and figuring out commands in MS-DOS. It was here I encountered the BASIC editor. It had a game pre-loaded on it, and I would not stop playing it. The object was to throw bananas from one gorilla to another, ultimately trying to knock the opposing gorilla off of a building. It wasn't all that intuitive. There was no mouse support. The only way to throw your bananas was to type in an angle to throw the bananas, and the computer would simulate the trajectory.

I didn't play it because of the gameplay. I didn't play it because of the graphics. I played it because I understood that the code I had to load into the BASIC editor in order to play it defined the rules and look of the game, and I wanted to figure it out.

I was five, closing in on six years old. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I ended up breaking the game by changing some of the code, and I was never able to play it again. But those few days plugging away at it? Those days sparked an interest in computer programming that has never left me.

A few years later, we got a new PC, and a friend of my older brother's brought over a stack of 3.5" floppy disks. Remember those?! Well, in that stack were two games: Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. My world was rocked. I had no idea games could look and play like this, and simulate the action and mayhem I loved about the movies of the time. I played these games almost daily, for hours on end, inspecting every pixel along the way, trying to figure out how the developers accomplished this amazing feat.

It was in this time I decided I wanted to be a game developer. I dove into research on how these games were made. I taught myself BASIC to learn fundamental coding concepts (probably not the best language choice, but I was 12 or 13, so...). I spent hours in my city's main library choosing programming and computer graphics books. I convinced my father to buy me a C compiler once I decided that was the language I needed to be investing my time in, and then I convinced him to get me a C++ compiler when I heard that was the next best thing.

It was a wild time. I was writing code I didn't fully understand. I crashed the family computer twice. My unending thirst for knowledge cost my father I don't know how much money in software, books, and hardware repairs after I decided the 486 processor needed to be overclocked so I could unlock faster draw speeds to the monitor (this was my train of thought back then).

What did all of that amount to? Did I make any games? Did I make, well, anything?

Nope.

That time period between the ages of 12 and 16 was my first real failure at computer programming. Sure, I learned syntax and a few basic concepts, but nothing stuck. I wasn't focused on any one thing for more than an afternoon. I couldn't actually do anything without the help of a book or tutorial I had stumbled across on the internet. I'm sure you've felt that way in your journey to become a developer as well.

After that realization hit me, I essentially quit. Why put all that time into something if I wasn't actually gaining anything from it? I did spend some time building web pages for my father's band, and for myself, but it wasn't anything fancy.

Fast forward 15 years. I was newly engaged with a baby on the way, holding down an OK sales job at a technology company. My fiancè had just left for work, and I was pulling out my laptop to start my day of running sales reports and checking my pipeline for whatever calls I needed to make or emails I needed to send. My phone rang. It was my boss. I answered quickly and politely, and as soon as I heard the tone in his voice, I knew he was laying me off.

I just bought an engagement ring. On credit.

I just found out I was going to be a dad.

Now I had no income.

I hit the pavement hard looking for a new job, but nothing panned out. Interview after interview, phone call after phone call. I was in a terrible state of mind, and I didn't know how to get back to good.

I was sitting at my computer staring at a job posting. I couldn't tell you what it was about as I wasn't there, mentally. Without much thought, I opened up Notepad and starting typing out HTML. I didn't really remember all that much, but I got something going. It had no point, no direction. Just a simple HTML document with some words and a picture.

Slowly the stress faded away. I kept going with this pointless page, drudging up memories of CSS and JavaScript and trying to figure out the right way to do things. Hours had gone by. My fiancè walked in from work, and I had to show her what I was doing. She welcomed my enthusiasm and encouraged me to keep going since it made me so happy after weeks of soul-crushing defeats.

The day after that, I sat back down at the computer with a purpose: learn the foundations of HTML and CSS. After that, I set out on the foundations of JavaScript. Each lesson I completed turned into a project, and I would not move on until I got it right.

You see, I remembered my initial failure when my goal was to be the next John Carmack (for those not familiar, he did all the engineering behind Wolfenstein 3D and Doom - big hero of mine). I was trying to take in so much without much thought in actually learning the foundations. When I decided to take a shot at web development, I promised myself that I wouldn't go down that path again, and with dogged determination, I got to the point where I was (somewhat) comfortable interviewing for positions.

It took eight months of little to no income, sitting in front of that computer for ten to twelve hours a day until I received a job offer for front end development. I still hold that position today. Not due to complacency, but due to the fact that I genuinely like what I do and who I work with, and I still feel I have things to learn from my peers.

If you're just getting started in this insanely fast-paced industry, and you've stuck with this story up until now, I want you to know that I'm living proof that a strong foundation in the basics of web development can and will get you a job. You don't need to learn the latest framework before you have at least a conversational knowledge of JavaScript, and you shouldn't. Take it slow. Enjoy the journey you set yourself out on. You'll be in a great position to market yourself if you do.

Good luck.

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