My Zero to Hero Journey to Becoming A Software Developer / Senior Dev (No CS Degree)

I am the same as most of you, or most likely worse. If you're watching this video, I am not special. I wasn't the best in school and my background was pretty regular. I made a lot of mistakes throughout my life, but I had grit. This is my story of how I became a senior developer. So when I was young in middle school, I played a lot of Magic the Gathering. I wasn't just going to small meetups. I was going to Junior Super Series, regionals and state, and I was top eighting at most of them. So why I'm telling that is because it showed that if I put my time into something and I had passion about it, I could be successful at it. And I actually ended up going to a high school in California for two years and then I got kicked out because I didn't go enough. I was always skipping class and hanging out with my friends. So I ended up at a continuation high school there. I was pretty good. I was in leadership. I actually graduated high school a year early, so I took a year off. I didn't know what to do. So I went to a community college in my area. And at that community college I went for a couple years and I met someone. They were a pharmacy technician and they're making a lot of money. So he pointed me to go to one of those colleges, a trade school. It was called Western Queer College at the time and now it's called Carrington College. So I went there to become a pharmacy technician. I did end up working at the senior center for the city, but I didn't know what to do at that time and somehow ended up in Korea again. I didn't know what to do. And my degree didn't really translate over into Korea at all because the medical systems, the abbreviating systems for doing pills are all different in every country. I was pretty lost in Korea in the beginning. I was partying, I was drinking, I was staying up really late. That Magic the Gathering kind of passion was. It was in the passion of like trying to busy myself and distract myself from feeling lost, I guess. And then I ended up deciding that I would teach English. It seemed like OK money at the time and they were always in need. So I was an English teacher and I did that for around four or five years. As I was getting older and older. Four or five years is pretty long. And I was getting closer and closer to 30 at that time. I was thinking to myself, I couldn't see myself being 40 and teaching ESL students as a. As an old man, unless you're super passionate about teaching English to ESL students and elementary school students. More power to you. But for me, I couldn't see myself like that. So I somehow ended up on this app called Meetup and I saw that there was a coding meetup. I was teaching English part time at the time. And I remember I picked up that flyer and I was playing Xbox like Madden or with a hangover. And I was just thinking, I can't live my life like this. So I called that phone number and this guy entered and he was like, yeah, come to this address. I went there and it was at a coding bootcamp. And I basically went there and I said, when can I start? I don't have a computer science degree. I don't particularly speak Korean or read and write Korean exceptionally. I went there and then they said, okay, we're going to start. So pulled up the money and I decided I would go to the boot camp. I went to the boot camp and it was a three month boot camp with a three month project. So it was fully six months. At that time I was still teaching English part time. But I got some opportunities during that time where there was a startup opportunity, global Startup center for an application period. So I filled it out for a reservation software. My application got picked. So then I remember I was really surprised. So I got a year of office space after I pitched the idea. So I went through round one and then round two, which was the pitch. And then I got selected. So I got a year of office space and I got some money from the government also. At that same exact time, I had an interview with a startup who couldn't pay me at the time, but they had a really cool idea. It was a real estate, some AI real estate software to predict prices in Korea. And I thought it was pretty interesting. And at the time I really just wanted to get a job and be around programmers. So I did take that job since I had the free year of office space. We actually use that office space for both the companies. The CEO of that real estate company was part of a big group called like Rotary Club. Through his network he found an angel investor. And that angel investor basically said, how much do you guys need on the team to dump? Just live. It was three of us. It wasn't that much money. It was probably like a thousand dollars each or something. And we called that ramen money. We could eat ramen every day and not be hungry and just work. And I think we grinded during that time and we really just worked every day, worked hard and that company actually got invested. Once we got invested, my salary increased a lot. I was so happy. I felt accomplished. I was not an AI engineer. Like I said, I'm not the smartest or I don't have a computer science degree. So I was just learning and I was doing front end development there at the time, just making dashboards and learning backend for Python and data scraping, data engineering. It was pretty cool. I worked there for about two and a half years and then I learned that I could fail there and I could learn a lot. And I learned many things. I learned Vue js, Django Flask, Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup and Selenium, learned how to run bots. And it was really interesting for me. But after a certain point I wasn't learning a lot there anymore. And I had another opportunity back at the bootcamp to go into software sales and do development. I took that, landed some contracts for the company, learned a lot about how the software business works. During that same time, I actually had a side project called Unicorn Ninjas. I stopped working at that real estate company and I decided to do the software sales and my side project, which was Unicorn Ninjas, it was a coding card game. We had a Kickstarter running at the time. Through market research, we saw that games were being introduced to young development education at like elementary schools. We made this educational piece of board game partner with the government and try to make money there. So we actually got selected for some government programs and ended up getting some good money there. I was also doing software sales and that's where I learned how to build mobile applications using React Native and Node JS and using authentication with Firebase. From there I worked there for a while. One of the companies that I got the software sales for actually offered me a position to be a lead developer at that company. It was a big decision at the time and I took it. So I built the team and it was around four or five developers and we all built this mental health journaling app that sells like health bands and shows how much you walk, tells you if you're healthy or not. It was pretty fun. And then the big part of there was an anger management class using the video call. So I got to experience using WebRTC and a lot of different technologies. I kept working there for a while actually, and the company was, wasn't super healthy, but it was still going. So I actually decided to move companies and work at a kickboard company working with IoT products because the kickboards would need to unlock and lock using a mobile application. It was really interesting and there we actually took on some outsourced projects with cryptocurrencies. Lead developer there was a good friend of mine and he was a very experienced blockchain developer and I wanted to work next to him so I could learn everything he knew. But working with people, you know, isn't the exact best situation. So I actually only worked there for a little bit and I ended up going to another blockchain company using the blockchain knowledge that I learned over at the kickboard company. Not that the blockchain was mixed with the kickboards whatsoever. There are two different projects. We had an outsourced blockchain project using in Korean it's Kareso, like a crypto wallet that could hold NFTs as well. It was super interesting for me. I went to a different blockchain company, I worked as a contract so I just set up some wallet connection stuff, some kind of transfer stuff and deployed their coin. I was also doing interviews because I was working from home and I thought I could do a couple of jobs at one time. So I actually got a job working with this startup program at the Seoul National University. Actually using the knowledge from the journaling application WebRTC stuff, they were basically making a software during the Corona times to make the students use a tablet and the teacher would use a computer and they would screen record what the students were doing so they couldn't watch Netflix. I was able to make a screen capture on socket for them. I was able to use the education and the experience that I got from past experiences and kind of make them stronger at these new positions. And then from there I got a job at my latest position which was making e commerce stuff and some social networking services and I was able to complete one application for them which was selling alcohol through the application. I was also we were making a big social networking service. But then I got laid off. Actually my whole team got laid off. That's the story of how I grew up and started and became a senior developer. I feel like one of the biggest characteristics that made me not lose hope was I didn't give up. I had a lot of grit and I was always a self starter and also just have passion for the project and passion for the team and put company first. Maybe when I was playing Magic the Gathering when I was young, if you talk badly about Magic the Gathering it would hurt me. So if I worked at a company and if you talk bad about the company, it would offend me. And that was kind of always the attitude that I had with something I'm doing. And just remember, if I can do it, you can do it, too. Coding saves lives.