AARON ENDSLEY

“The Dogs name is the color green” - Me

Computers have been a part of my life for as long as i can remember. My first computer was a commodore amiga, but i didn’t really take full interest in them and what they could be used for until my Dad taught me how to write HTML when I was in the Sixth grade. I was fascinated by entering different words into the color attribute on an html font tag, each letter I entered would change the color of the word on the screen. My grandparents had a dog named “Windsor”, I descided to enter the dogs name into the color attribute. I typed: color =“windsor”. Hit Save. Hit Refresh. The color changed to an ugly puke green. From that moment on I was hooked.

Fast Forward to college. The MySpace days had begun. Every Single one of my friends was downloading or entering there myspace login to use different plugins to add customizations, wether it was a flashy sign, different borders. I wanted to do the same, but i really didn’t want to give some random website my login credentials, i noticed a box in the styling section that had the ability for you enter your own HTML, so I began to experiment with that. Again, I was intrigued.

I got married, and my wife and I were going to a new church and they needed someone to do the website, so I volunteered, surely I could handle this, myspace was a cake walk right, this couldnt be that hard. I was so wrong. The year was 2008 and my programming skills were circa 1999. I decided to go back to college where I majored in Multimedia Design, I excelled at all my web development classes but my other classes only got less than half of my attention, I was enamered by this new thing called CSS and this new HTML Tag called a DIV that replaced my use of tables.

When I finished school after a few months of being on the job hunt, I got a job as a graphic designer. During this time I had discovered team treehouse, and began learning Responsive Design, and a small bit of Javascript with Jquery. My graphic design position came to an end after a year, the contract was at an end. I was jobless. I was applying to every graphic design Job I could find. As I was doing this though I was also spending alot of time learning Javascript, and Angular 1 at the time. So I spent three months learning, building, and applying to different Jobs.

One day one the main recruiter who had stuck with me the whole time I was jobless, called me one day and told me about an interview for a junior web developer position. I did not think I was going to get the Job. I sat down in the lobby, talked with one of the other candidates who was waiting to be interviewed like me. I was not expecting to get the job at all, I was ready to add it to the long lists of “atleast i tried” roles. I went in to the interview, answered their questions, smiled, laughed, and had an enjoyable interview.

I got home, and got a call from my recruiter, she said I got the position and asked me when I was able to start.

That is the TLDR of how I became a programmer.

If there is one valuable tidbit I think to take from this short post its this: If a skill itrigues you, if it keeps your attention, try.