How will I become a web developer ... and will I?

In the wake of his recent interview and as Friday, I am publishing a more detailed story about my plans for moving from designers to web developers to discuss and receive advice from the community. I write exclusively from myself, no one stands above the soul and the text does not read, there is no hidden implication and tricks of HR managers, as is the case in other articles about successful retraining.

Prologue

On Habré, there are often articles on the topic “from taxi drivers to programmers for 9 months” ... And what if I'm just going to overcome this path? And suddenly it will not work? In any case, I want to tell a little about myself, what I want and why I decided to go this way. This is not just another success story and may never become one, but I think there will be people who will see their fears and excuses in these lines and decide to change something. I want to talk about what has already been done and what is only planned, and get feedback from experienced specialists of the region. So, let's go through the order.

A little bit about yourself

Anatoly, 27 years old
City: Smolensk
Marital status: married, has a daughter and mortgage
University and specialty: NRU "MEI", engineer ASOIU
Army service: radio interception OsNaz GRU
Current profession: design engineer 2 categories

In programming I am not quite a novice, I have a certain background behind my back. Began learning from BASIC and Pascal in high school, then there was Delphi, C / C ++, PHP, JavaScript. Now my main language is Go. And of course, C for microcontrollers.

Between the fourth and fifth year of study, he spent four months in America on a ~~free labor~~ program .Work and Travel, where a little pulled up spoken English and traveled a lot (photo taken in Silicon Valley). After the institute I went to the army at the call, where I served behind a radio interception post and wrote games on the VBA, which I returned to tell about in Habré.

I got to the plant while studying at the institute to practice, and after the army I returned to the same place, which was well reflected in my career growth. My current tasks include a full cycle of development and maintenance of gas analysis devices: from designing electrical circuits to writing textual documentation. The range of tasks is very smeared, we do everything at once. This is where the first experience of writing and maintaining telemetry collection servers from sensors appeared. As the language for the backend, I chose Go, and for the frontend, Vue.js.

My way to the web

Ever since my student days, I have been a little (mostly as a hobby) doing the creation / doping / support of websites on ready-made engines and writing various PHP parsers for them: pictures, products, articles, comments. At this my knowledge on the web until recently ended.

I met Go in the middle of last year, choosing it as a language for a working task: I had to raise a server to collect telemetry from sensors via TCP. The acquaintance was successful, I quickly managed to solve the task and began to delve further into the study. Passed two courses from Mail.ru on Coursera, decided on it a couple more application tasks, one of which turns on Heroku and helps me to this day: it drives through itself and gives me videos from video hosting sites, because we have access to video files at work .

Also, a year ago, I started writing a browser-based io-toy JS (Phaser) + Go on web sites. He took the idea and graphics of the old bluetooth toy BiPlanes with the intention of adding several types of games (Death Match, Capture the Flag, Rugby) and dividing players into small rooms of 10 people.

I thought for a long time how to organize AI for bots, but never came up with it, and unfortunately the work was suspended, because Now busy with another project, about which further.

As an acquaintance, the task was to develop an automated control system for outdoor lighting: this included designing the device itself and writing the server and client parts for management. After developing and assembling a board for writing software for a microcontroller, he took a colleague as an apprentice, while he himself took up the server part. The server’s tasks include periodic polling of device parameters via TCP and REST API support for the SPA. For the client side, I took Vue as an admin panel blank, connected it to the server side via JWT, and gradually increased the functionality of both parts.

At this stage, it looks like this (there are two tiers of boards, if that):

Now we are negotiating on the settlement of relations, investments and further development of the system.

In the process, I realized that I really lacked knowledge of SQL: I simply did not understand how the query for joining two tables works. I began to look for ways to improve my knowledge in this area: I read a little / looked at theories and took up the practice on the SQL-EX website. I am very pleased with the result: I solved more than 80 tasks and received a basic certificate, now I feel a little more confident in SQL. I plan to gradually solve the tasks for the extended certificate.

Ongoing work involves an abundant number of business trips across the expanses of our vast country. From the moment I became ill with the idea of professional reorientation, I began to adjust my business trips in such a way that I could get to various meetings, which somehow affected web programming, by traveling through Moscow or St. Petersburg.

On mitapas I try to listen and delve into everything that is pronounced, make new acquaintances and dive into this culture. Honestly, there is not enough knowledge and experience, but the human brain is such a thing that everything heard is deposited in a distant box, and I am sure that someday it will be useful to me. Here I signed up for online access to Slurm-2, I hope to get a little pumped out in the DevOps area.

Why I decided to change jobs

In short, I just got bored. Last year there were no interesting projects, no developments of new technology. All work is insignificant, my development just stopped. I want to work and be useful in the end.

Working at the plant, I feel lagging behind the world. How many modern technologies pass by us ?! But what to say when I'm the only one in the department who uses Git? The rest of the employees, who call themselves "programmers", still keep programs in different folders and periodically lose the "desired" version.

Of course, there should be a paragraph about the salary, and this is generally a sore subject for me. And the matter is not even in specific amounts (I consider my salary quite normal - about two average in the region), but in the fact that my wife earns more ... I’m kind of pleased and everything, but can you imagine how it affects me? No comments.

And most importantly, the IT field provides unlimited opportunities for development, while at the plant this development is very modest, the area and range of tasks is very narrow and you are practically tied to a single place of work, with such skills I can hardly come up with in other places. I want to create a real product that works and can be used, but it ’s not ~~all about the~~ bureaucracy and the reading of the GOST on safety.

My plans

In short, then: study, study and study again, and also stop being afraid and start sending out resumes in search of a new job. I'm trying to make my transition smooth, gradually mixing tasks for hardware with tasks for backend programming.

I consider the lack of a mentor to be a big problem; one could turn to him for advice or just talk about the web; everything has to be drawn from articles on the Internet. In principle, now I am even ready to work on the idea of running a more competent programmer to gain relevant experience.

In the near future, I plan to devote a lot of time to reading Martin Kleppman's book “Highly loaded Applications” and still finish reading it to the end, it has a positive effect on my awareness of what is happening there in the Web. And this is not a ploy at all against the background of a recent article, the interview was compiled a month before, I really read it ... I found out about it from an interview with Oh, my code with course instructor Vasily Romanov from Golang from Mail.ru. Although what am I making excuses for ?!

My fears

I am sure that almost everyone who wants to change jobs, even not necessarily in a new area, has such fears. Here the so-called impostor syndrome partly speaks for you, you need to understand this.

Fear # 1 - Little experience for a new job.
Yes - a little, yes - it would be nice to have more, but experience is gainful: you can not know a particular technology, but no one has canceled life experience and the desire to develop. In general, I consider all my life experience to be unique: yes, I in the army with satellites scripts filtered information about how many refrigerators are loaded into the Air Force One . Well, by itself, not only that ... but the story is silent about this.

Fear # 2 - Businesses need middles / seniors / leads, but not junas
Yes, vacancy statistics confirm this, but there are vacancies for junas, and this is the main thing. And who said it would be easy? Have to search.

Fear # 3 - The salary of a juna in a new area for me will be much lower than I have now, and in fact I need to support my family.
This is the main fear. I hope to compensate in part for it at the expense of higher IT rates in general. I understand that you may have to agree to a certain wage downgrade, but I’m ready to make up my mind for the sake of greater prospects, especially since my wife recently left the decree and we are slowly beginning to get on our feet after a two-year hunger strike. She supports me in this, and the other day she said: “Let's move on?”. And where can I go, having the experience of developing only gas analyzers ?! It is even more motivating to change profession.

Fear # 4 - The first job should not be deleted.

I believe that there are no problems at all in the organization of distant work with modern technologies, be it a beginner or a seasoned one. For me, the situation is such that in my city there are practically no companies that would need backend developers: there are only small web studios that rivet business card sites, so I’ll have some experience in office work. Here I am ready to consider the option of a temporary relocation for an internship to Moscow or Minsk with the further continuation of work remotely. Apparently this is practiced.

Fear # 5 - My age is no longer quite suitable for the juna
Well, here I hope I already have a little more experience than yesterday’s student, and everything else will have to be made up for by my own work - I always considered myself a capable student.

My goals

Of course, the most global goal: to become a remote backend developer, rent a quiet room and do what you like. Yes, I understand that I look at the world through the prism of rose-colored glasses, but I want it and believe in it. Smolensk is located between Moscow and Minsk at 4 hours drive from each, which should be very convenient in the case of any mitap, if I were not only iron bound to the factory entrance.

And the local goals so far look like this:

1. To finish reading the book “Highly loaded applications”.
2. Start sending out resumes and interviews.
3. More practice ... Resume work on the game.
4. Continue to solve problems from SQL-EX and begin to understand query optimization.

Conclusion

I hope the story turned out not too messy, waiting for your comments with comments and suggestions. By the way, tomorrow I go to my first interview in the IT field.