Why I chose Software Developer career as a high school student
Tags: javascript, career
Published: 2021-02-19 15:34:34

Hi, my name is Carlos Guedes and I’m 21 years old. I’m currently living in Portugal (born and raised), and I’m at the beginning of my software engineer career (Junior Front End Developer).

I decided to share my experience so far, and doing so, maybe it’ll help others to clarify doubts about it.

I’m going to start with the reasons why I chose this career path:

* I only had three options to choose from in High School (in 10th grade in Portugal): since I was in Science and Technologies, I had three main routes to choose in high school: Computing, Electronics, and Electrotechnics.

* At the time, when I started looking for university courses, I noticed that all engineering-related courses had, at least, one class that involved programming. Since I had a small idea that I wanted an engineering route in my life, I decided to choose Computing.

* I decided since very young, that I’ll make every effort possible to make enough income for me to enjoy life, and be able to pay my bills. A computer science route was going to let me be financially able to pursue these goals faster than a regular job, wherever I was living in Portugal, or not.

> I really enjoy computer science, but I started to realize that only in university.

# High School

In high school, I started with a class called Computing Initiation (among Math, Portuguese, Chemistry, and Physics, etc). I was an average student, finishing with a grade of 12 overall (in Portugal, we grande 0 to 20).

In that class, I started to learn Pascal **and it was boring!**
I performed really badly in that class, finishing with an 11. It was a destitute grade for me, but I couldn’t stay focused and started to regret and thinking if programming was the right direction for me.

In the following year, computing classes tripled: going from Pascal to C++, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript and SQL (mainly in the terminal). Studying C++ got me real hard into programming.

> And it was at that point that I realized that programming was not that bad after all.

When I was in my last year of high school, I had an internship in a bus company. My job was to update their website, and databases (updating bus routes, etc.).

> In that last year, I also learned Visual Basic and improved my Web Developing knowledge.

At the end of my last year in high school, I decided to choose a Web Developing related course in university called Web Information Systems and Technologies!

# University

In **[Web Information Systems and Technologies](https://www.esmad.ipp.pt/cursos/licenciatura/663)**, I learned so many things that I’ll carry for the rest of my life. **Not only technical but also professional and personal.**

My university path had highs and lows, but overall, I’m proud of the choice I made, not only for the technologies I enroll in but also for all the knowledge I acquired about teamwork:

* How to be in an AGILE environment (it was applied in every practice-class project)

* How to plan a project from 0

* How to function with an AGILE board

* Ways to lead a team and a project, etc.

All of this while learning some recent technologies, and that prepared me for the job market.

One big downside of the course was that not every class was Web Development related. Some had nothing to do with Web Development (3D Modeling and Animation and Physics Applied to Programming are great examples of that), and others were more inclined to business.

> Not that it was a bad thing (I still retain a lot of insights from those classes), but I didn’t enjoy theoretical classes at all, and 3D Modeling and Animation was horrifying!!

At this moment I started to realize that everything that I was learning in the classes was not enough, so I decided to improve my skills, making small projects to learn new things about VueJS (at the moment), read more documentation, and improve my Web Dev skillset.

# Infraspeak

At the end of the 3rd year, while finishing my internship (developing a React Native application with Augmented Reality), I decided to start looking for what the Portugal Dev Market was offering.

I only did two interviews. I didn’t really enjoy the first one (because it was for a company that served as an intermediate), and they were looking for someone with more experience than me; and the second one, was at [Infraspeak](https://medium.com/infraspeak). And it is where I am now, a Junior Front End Developer, in a great workplace and in an awesome team! 
I just thank Infraspeak for taking me and helping me to become a greater person while becoming a great developer.

# Future

I’m always looking up to what’s next. My main goal now is to work hard and learn in the best way possible, while helping my team and Infraspeak to reach our goals.
But my main goal is to work abroad, mainly in **London**.
I quite enjoy traveling, and London is my top destination in the world, and I’ll try in every way possible to work there (not only for new career opportunities but also to be able to achieve a goal that I have since little).

I think with the way I’m working and with my current mindset, it’ll not take too long before I can accomplish that.

I hope you enjoyed this post, and that I helped you in any way possible!