How this English teacher taught himself how to code and got his first remote coding job

Watch the full interview here : 

In this episode of Stories of Hackers, we learned about the story of Kelvin, who came from an education background and used to be a English teacher. Kelvin was a self-taught coder and able to turn his career around, now he is working a remote coding job.  We hope that you guys can gain some new insights through this interview, enjoy!

Can you give a short introduction for people who want to know more about your story?

Hello guys, my name is Kelvin, I come from an education background and used to be an English Teacher. When I first studied in uni , they had a basic course in HTML and it was very basic that they just taught about using notepad and then using a basic HTML page but that's how I started my interest in building websites and later on learning more about code. I went to Udemy and learned about CSS and Javascript and I can build some learning tools for the students and then I went on for my internship even though I was a top schooler at that time, I felt quite a culture shock right? It's very different in the real work environment than what they taught in the University. I ask myself, do I really want to do that for the next 30 years? The answer is no, then since I am already developing some stuff for the kids maybe I should join the tech industry and  I got quite a few job offers in Java.

Nobody really believed in me to be able to work in tech because I don't have a degree in Computer Science. Luckily I came across The Hacker Collective and the fees are very affordable but I still had problems with paying the fees. So how i covered the fees was i went on and proofread other people's assignments and even clean the house of other people, to pay the fees, even though i had like some problems to pay, they gave me some buffer time to pay so i managed to pay anyway and got a job offer from you guys (THC) and i worked as a front-end guy for about one year. It was after this, people around me started to take me seriously and they even asked me to help them build their website. My parents also offered to sponsor me study one year in the university

What's the direction that people should take? Should they go to uni or should they be like you just learn and do the job and then go to uni later? What’s your advice?

Before you join any industry, you shouldn't just look at the good sides of the industry. You have to also like be a bit realistic and ask yourself whether you can tolerate the bad side of the industry, for example in coding right, you have to face the computer almost all the time and hardly face people but for me it's okay so i think this industry is okay for me so you have to ask yourself do you really want to work in the industry?

You should talk to the people in the industry not just directly sign up for the course, what I did was I listened to some of the youtubers to understand what they feel about the industry and then also try coding. A lot of people have this mindset that they think that coding is something arcane, magical like only genius can do it but actually it's not the case actually you should just  try it anyway,  it doesn't cost money just go online and you can find lots of free resources. Try and then decide if coding is really suitable for you.

Can you share what are your plans as a developer in the next three to five years?

The other day, I was listening to this tech youtuber who used to work for Facebook and Google and now he's an entrepreneur. He said that in your first five years in tech don't be afraid to change around. It's okay to start off as a web developer and then you change to others,

It's very normal and so I think I'm fine with working as either web developer or data scientist. In the next three to five years, I see myself working in a job with a good work-life balance, so that I can have the time for my own personal projects. I am currently working on building my own website that has machine learning in the website 

As a developer now, what is something you wish you could improve on or you feel that you are lacking that will help you in your career?

If anything I feel like I need to do more collaboration projects because most of the time I just work on my own. Tech industry is very broad, people come from different backgrounds and specialize in different things so it's helpful to have someone else that specializes in the other subject. Nobody can know everything in technology so if you have someone else that is specialized in something else then you will make the project a lot smoother and faster, you also learn from them of course.

Can you share with somebody out there now who wants to work on coding, what excites you that maybe can excite them as well?

One of the interesting fields in programming now that I think is very relevant is data science. Nowadays,  everything is about data now like our phones, social media and you can do a lot of things with data. Your data tells a lot about your like your web browsing history and your your social media posts.In my current program, it’s mainly focusing on data science and how to actually do the reporting to the key stakeholders in the organization and its not just limited to this that you can expand it into software development and just make something smart, build even more sophisticated software.

Is there anything that you wish to share to people who want to learn coding, maybe someone two years behind you in your journey?

Go and talk to the people in the industry and then try to build something. Don't worry about making mistakes, just go and try it. There are a lot of free resources that you can find online. Just use the online free resources and build something, anything, just build something.

Thanks for the awesome interview!

Hope you enjoyed this series! 

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