My Coding Adventure: Balancing a full-time job, evening classes, and a Drum & Bass events and DJing side hustle
Tags: javascript, beginners, programming, learning
Published: 2024-02-09 06:07:59

I started my coding adventure in 2020 (although I did have a bit of HTML & CSS experience prior). I had been travelling Australia and Asia for a few years, and decided it was time to start kicking some career goals. 

I enrolled onto a Cert IV in Programming which also allowed me to stay in Australia on a student visa in Melbourne, little did I know that the whole world was about to go to sh*t. After about a month of being enrolled, lockdowns started, and being a student who had invested all my money into coming back to Australia and study, this left me in a pretty difficult situation. I decided that if I wanted to stay and continue my studies, I had to take action, which let to me and my partner put the remaining money we had into a car (a 1990 Holden Commodore who we named Michael). We hit the roads, became essential workers, and went to do farm work. As we had both previously done a lot of farm work on Working Holiday Visas (WHVs), we were well accustomed to this already and already had a bunch of good farm connections. Looking back on it, I'm quite glad this is what we did, although it was hard, we had a lot of fun and managed to avoid the lockdowns.

Our first stop was Renmark, SA, where we picked oranges. We lived on a free camp in our car and I kept my studies up during this time. It was very difficult as I was working long hours doing very physical work, nothing was open, so I had to charge my laptop in the shopping malls, and work on my projects whilst living in a car. Even with all this happening, I was able to successfully complete my course. It got better as the year went on, we moved from oranges to blueberries in Tabulam, NSW where we rented a room, and establishments were open.

Once I had completed my Cert IV, I put a pause on my studies temporarily and focused on work. I also run Drum & Bass events and DJ in Melbourne so my time was taken up by all of these things, however I would often work on little projects during my spare time, such as my DJ website.

Fast forward to November 2023, I decided to continue my Software Engineering studies, and signed up to Academy XI's Software Engineering transform program. I am loving it so far but it is very full on. I'm currently trying to balance my full-time job as an E-Commerce Coordinator, my event business and DJing (which is a lot of work, especially on the social media front), and my course. The first couple of months was quite smooth sailing, I'm already very familiar with a lot of the HTML & CSS basics, so I was able to breeze through that part.

Now it's getting a bit more intensive, although I already had some JS knowledge from my Cert IV, it barely scratched the surface on what we are learning now. Balancing everything has been tricky, I unfortunately have quite a large-scale event planned for the same weekend as my first JavaScript project is due in 😮‍💨. It has not been an easy week, and I've made the decision to downscale my events temporarily (although I wont stop DJing), until my course is completed later in the year.

Part of the requirements for each project is to write a blog post, so I thought it would be cool to write a bit of an intro post first, over the next few months I'll be writing posts which talk about the projects I'm doing with Academy XI.

I think I now understand why everyone talks about how they hate JavaScript so much, it's very overwhelming and I've always found languages like Java and Python a little easier to grasp, however I'm looking forward to improving my skills and getting out of the "Valley of Despair".

Wish me luck!
[Github Profile](https://github.com/saradomincroft)