Last week you showed me where you code. This week I want to know how you ended up there in the first place, and whether you're planning to stay.
I'll go first. Grab a snack, mine has a plot twist šæ
The gadget kid
I've loved computers and gadgets for as long as I can remember. If there was a new device in the house, I wanted to know how it worked. So growing up, getting into tech felt natural. Why wouldn't I spend my life doing the thing I loved? In high school, I chose ICT as my elective and joined the school robotics club. We even made it to a regional robotics competition and came third! At that point, my future felt pretty obvious.
Our third-place robot, built with LEGO Mindstorms. Sadly, LEGO has since discontinued Mindstorms, and I would have loved to keep using it for hobby projects.
Plot twist: I studied Development Planning
Then it was time for university, and life had other plans. Development Planning was my second choice, and my parents didn't want me leaving our city for my bachelor's. So that's where I ended up, spending four years studying something I had no real interest in.
If you've never heard of it, a lot of Development Planning is about how communities and cities grow: where roads, schools, hospitals and housing should go, and how to make places work better for the people living in them.
But tech found me anyway
Somewhere in the middle of that degree, we were introduced to GIS (Geographic Information Systems), and it was the coolest thing in the whole course for me. GIS is software that lets you put data on a map and analyse it. You stack layers like roads, rivers, buildings and population on top of each other, and suddenly you can answer real questions. Where is the best place to build a new school? Which areas are most likely to flood? Which neighbourhoods are too far from a hospital? For the first time in my degree, I was using technology to solve real problems, and I was hooked.
That led me down a rabbit hole into smart cities and smart buildings. A smart city uses sensors, data and connected devices to run things better, like traffic lights that adjust to real traffic, bins that tell the council when they're full, and buses that share their live location. Smart buildings do the same on a smaller scale, controlling lighting, heating and energy use based on who's actually in the room. It was the perfect mix of the two worlds I was stuck between.
Teaching myself on the side
So I started teaching myself. HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript. Lots of tutorials, lots of broken layouts, and lots of console errors I didn't understand yet. I built some cool things just because I could, and every time something worked, it reminded me how much I loved this.
The question that changed everything
As I got older, one question kept coming back to me: do I really want to spend the rest of my life doing a job I don't even like?
This time, nobody else was making the decision for me. So I made it myself and went for a Master's in Computer Science, a conversion course made for people coming from non-tech degrees.
So, am I staying?
Yes. If anything, the detour made me more sure. I know what it feels like to spend years on something you don't love, and I'm not going back. One day I'd love to bring my two worlds together and build tech for the buildings and cities I used to study.
I'm asking you because tech feels different right now. Junior roles feel harder to get, AI is changing what our jobs look like, and a lot of people are wondering if they should stay or try something else. I think those conversations are worth having out loud.
Now it's your turn
How did you end up in tech?
Are you planning to stay, or are you thinking about moving into something else?
If you've ever left tech or come back to it, what made you decide?
And if you're studying or working in something you don't love right now, let this be your sign that it's never too late to switch. I'd love to hear your stories. :)š
Top comments (55)
I got into this field out of curiosity and a sense that my other possible career directions lacked creativity and agency.
It's been a long and windy journey but I'm in it for the long haul.
Iām so glad your long and windy journey led you here, because it gave so many of us a place to learn and share. Hereās to the long haul! ļ¼ļæ£ļø¶ļæ£ļ¼āć
After reading your story, it reminded me that we briefly mention about Lego Mindstorm back early in 2026 in the article on why I became a developer.
Why did you become a Developer?
I was about to write my story here, but realized that it was already answered lol. Might do a remaster later next year, but idk yet.
Thanks for sharing though :D
I remember that thread! I told you about the RISE software and you told me about your uncle building a Rubikās cube solver with Lego Mindstorms. Funny enough, I still have Rubikās cubes on my desk, so maybe I need a solver too š And now that Mindstorms is discontinued, maybe itās finally time I try Arduino like you suggested. You should definitely do the remaster, Iād love to read it.
Will prob actually do it on the DEV one year anniversary for me! Look forward to it and looking forward on the Arduino as well (if your planning on sharing ofc)
Yes, Iāll definitely share it! Once I finish my Masters next year, Iām planning to start playing around with Arduino as a hobby. Your one year anniversary on DEV is in January, right? Thatās not far at all, Iāll be looking out for the remaster!
Yep! I am also planning on the DEVengers announcement as well along with that (I think it's on the same day as my one year).
Speaking of which, what do you think of joining us?
cc: @georgekobaidze @hemapriya_kanagala @dj29
I'd love to join! How do i get started?
I sent an invite to your email. You should see it there either in Junk or in the primary inbox.
For the posts under the org itself, I would say post anything that is high quality and is simple to read like the post you read from @dj29 on C!
I am planning on creating a discord server in the near future, so that you can contact me there, though soon lol
Awesome !
Welcome to the team, Maame š
Thank you Hemapriya! Excited to join :)
I also followed an irregular path just like you: I studied business and finance at University after which I started my drone filming company. I realized during my time building out my drone media services that I had all these ideas to build software around the services offered. That's when I enrolled into a coding bootcamp. Those 9 weeks of learning web development were intense but have changed my life as I then went on to work professionally as a software engineer and still am to this day!
Thanks so much for sharing this, Julien! A drone filming company is such a cool starting point. I love that the idea to code came from seeing problems in your own business, thatās the best kind of motivation
I am a Veterinary š . I came to IT cause I think we where at the edges of a big changing era... it was around 1995/98 and I was looking at Internet. I think I was right then got trap at midle 2010's in this crazy AI stuff... Now I am stuck here š
Haha a vet turned AI engineer, thatās such a cool story š Seeing where the internet was going back in the 90s was a smart call. Do you ever miss working with animals?
I've always been interested in tech, but before this career, it was more of a background pursuit.
Back then, my goal was to become a mathematician. I studied hard, learned how to prove theorems, and solved difficult problems on paper. That was actually where I wrote my very first line of code in Python back in 2017, it was mostly just to visualize mathematical concepts.
Software engineering didn't become my main path until I found out my girlfriend was working two jobs to cover her expenses. I didn't want her carrying that weight alone, so I decided to give software engineering a serious shot so she wouldn't have to work so hard. Ever since then, I fell in love with it and never looked back and yes, I am staying. we have invented too many tools and only very few of us have ever explored them to the fullest potential.
Thank you for sharing this Adam, itās such a sweet storyš„¹. Choosing a new path so your girlfriend wouldnāt have to carry everything alone says a lot about you, and I love that you ended up falling in love with it too.
Writing your first Python code to visualise maths concepts is a really cool start. And I agree with your last point, there are so many tools out there and most of us only use a small part of what they can do.
Glad youāre staying :)
I like how your story shows that getting into tech doesn't always mean taking a straight path. Sometimes the thing that pulls you in is something you discover along the way. I'm curious whether the mix of Development Planning and Computer Science will eventually lead you toward building solutions for cities and buildings.
Iām getting curious myself about combining the two. Seeing how tech can solve real problems in cities and buildings makes me want to explore it more, so who knows, that might be where I end up. Thanks for reading, Mohsen!
I got into tech out of curiosity,
Since childhood, I have loved technology; I would tear my dad's radio apart to figure out how it worked. I gradually began fixing electronics and even mobile devices. I wanted to further my studies in the area, but it was too expensive for me at that time, so I pivoted to automobile spare parts, where I began learning about cars and their parts while selling them. It was during the 9 years of the automobile training that I discovered I could create designs by writing text (HTML & CSS).
8 years have gone by since I got into tech, and I don't see myself leaving tech anytime soon, not even because of AI.
Thank you for sharing this Victory! Taking apart your dadās radio to see how it works is such a great start, that curiosity really shows.
I love that you found HTML and CSS while working in automobile parts. It proves thereās no single path into tech. HTML and CSS were where I started too, and I still remember how exciting it felt to write text and see a design appear.
8 years and still going strong is amazing. Hereās to many more!
Nice š
Started writing code aged 7 (back in 1983), fell in love with it, and never really stopped š
Wow Jon, coding at 7 is amazing! Not many people find what they love that early, so thatās really special. Glad it stuck with you all these years :)
I studied Geophysics (not computer science) at FUTO and self-taught programming to go parallel with my education.
Today, I use data to build machine learning agents that interpret groundwater geoelectrical surveys in the Niger Delta.
So, what's your perspective on this confluence of tech and the built environment? What have you learned through your own work with GIS that the majority of developers don't understand?
Going from Geophysics to ML agents that read groundwater surveys in the Niger Delta is such a cool path, Daniel! Thatās exactly the kind of work that excites me, tech solving a real problem on the ground.
I think the built environment is one of the biggest opportunities in tech. Cities and buildings produce so much data, but very few people understand both sides.
The biggest thing GIS taught me is that location is never just two numbers. Every point on a map has people, land use, history and rules attached to it, and the map is often different from whatās actually on the ground. Most developers treat location as coordinates in a database, but the real answers are in the context around it. Planning also taught me to think in decades, because you canāt roll back a road the way you roll back a deploy.
Iād love to explore that combination more and see where it takes me.
I didn't really start to pursue being a programmer / developer until my mid 30s. However, I don't know why, because I was always an obnoxiously curious person that wanted to know how it worked and why for anything that interested me. As a side job in middle and high school, I repaired computers, laptops, phones, etc., but never did anything software-related until I tried modding the Return to Castle Wolfenstein multiplayer game. With modding, though, I really just tried to make a map and spawn characters with rocket-propelled grenades with a net and played dodgeball with them. It was very fun, but it didn't really go anywhere, and I don't know what I really learned there as it was mostly like using a rudimentary app like Blender.
What made me really want to change my career is that the current job I had was working with sharp glass and heavy objects, and while it kept me fit and I enjoyed it, I kept getting pulled into computers after hoursāplaying games, tweaking stuff, fiddling, and figuring out stuff. It was more and more interesting as it went on, and by the time I had my first daughter, I had an opportunity to do a bootcamp from Kansas University for a 6-month web developer course. I took it and went there every day. It was hard and fast, and I didn't even learn that much there because it was a new subject every week. I did, however, take notes, review, and practice them in my free time for 2 years following, and then started applying for positions anywhere.
300+ rejections in (it felt like), and I got to work as a web developer for a content management system with HTML, CSS, JS, and C# for the backend. I learned a lot there and then got into my current role as a software developer for the last 5 years. I still work on side projectsālike I made a physics engine using Python to learn, and made it so with a click of a button gravity swaps from Z to Y, making the top-down shooter game a platformer game. I haven't created any levels for it, though. But yeah, I enjoy it and it keeps me interested in what I can do next.
I would like to be more collaborative and engage with the development community, but I think that's on me for not involving myself and partially from imposter syndrome making me feel inadequate.
300+ rejections and you still kept going, thatās really inspiring. And spending 2 years going over your bootcamp notes on your own shows how much you wanted this.
The gravity swap in your physics engine is such a cool idea. One click and a top-down shooter becomes a platformer? You should write a post about it here, Iād love to read how you built it.
And honestly, a comment like this is already you engaging with the community. You clearly have a lot to share!
Thanks! I appreciate the reply, That's not a bad idea I really like to play around with it. but its very bare bones in terms of gameplay / levels its more of a proof of concept than anything.
The gravity part isn't too crazy complex it's basically just using colliders for walls/floors and then modifies the y gravity pull applies gravity or not based on the space bar turning gravity on and off. I can make a deeper dive if there's interest though. Thanks
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