My Journey
When I was 16, my impressions of coders were that of basement dwelling creatures, rarely creeping out of the house into the sunlight. They spend their time tinkering obsessively with a piece of metal box. When you pry the metal box away from them, they would screech loudly and begin to agressively attack you.
Yes, I did imagined Gollum.Wait, so how did I end up being a coder myself?
I studied Physics in National University of Singapore (Yes, you can start steoreotyping me). I picked up a coding module and the experience blew me away. It was actually really fun and enjoyable. I especially enjoy working on algorithmic problems such as those found in leetcode or project euler. When you are stuck at a problem for a long time and finally managed to solve it, it was euphoric.
When I graduated, I was offered a RPA (Robotic Processing Automation) developer role from UST Global. I get deployed to various places where I help various employees by automating their workflows.
Me getting my photo taken for my first lanyard!It was definitely a fun experience and I made a lot of close friends. However, I quickly came to realize the limits of RPA. RPA uses a single tool with its own language. It was much more convenient than other languages but that convenience comes at a price. I was narrowly scoped. I wanted more and bigger projects.
An opportunity came to me in the form of a front end development role. Credit Agricole graciously reached out their hand and granted me a chance to work on their internal websites. Henceforth, I started working on frontend projects using C#. It was much more challenging but luckily for me, there were many seniors there that I can learn from.