My road to Front-End Dev
Published: 2021-08-05 13:10:09

   Hello beautiful people. Let me introduce myself: My name is Federico, 27, Argentinian, IT worker for the last seven years more or less.
   The intention behind this post is to start writing/blogging in English. I was struggling a lot choosing the topic for it. Despite having enough knowledge for writing something more technical, my final decision was to write about how do I evolve from that kid that wanted to hack de NASA to who I'm 10 years later.
   This story begins when I was a kid/teenager. I had some experience playing games, browsing the web, and that kind of stuff, but I needed something more. The thing that mainly called my attention was "cracking" games, installing them, copy-pasting some .exe files to the program files folder to make it work without bought them was something that I need to understand. I started googling "what's a crack?" "how do cracks work?" and figured out that cracks were modified software, crackers were kind of hackers and discovered a whole new world. 
   I decided that I wanted to crack/hack things, so, naturally, I needed to understand how Software works. After hours of googling stuff and scrolling into long forums threads figured out that I need to learn to code.
   That was the starting of a long hate-love relationship. I started writing some .bat files that shut down the computer, then more complex scripts that behaved like a Q-A mini-game until I wrote my first "masterpiece", a contact book full written on batch (hopefully I will find the post where I shared that code). 
   After that, the next goal was to do something more user-friendly I was tired of seeing the MS-DOS console. So, at my 14's I learned HTML, looking back is funny that the tutorial had a table-based version and a "newer version" with divs. Was the year 2007 and Javascript for me was something "weird" that allows making snow on my page. 
   A few years after that, when I finished high school I was completely sure that I wanted to study something related to software development. I started college, followed the path to "Software Developer", a lot of C#, Windows Forms, PHP, and JAVASCRIPT. The year was 2013 and Angular.Js was something, I got an internship job with Angular.js and from that moment I forgot all about my hacking/cracking intention, my new goal was to make cute dynamic websites. I had that job for almost a year and was the kick-off of my career. 
   My second job was on an ERP company, doing help-desk and writing some windows forms apps working as aux-software for the ERP, mainly allowing to import excel files and hitting the database to insert the required data. 1 year in that company trying to convince the head of developers (some 50 years guy that only liked Visual Basic and doesn't trust in web-based stuff) that we can do better if we make a web platform with all the needed features and stop carrying .exe files in a pen drive to the client's servers and installing it there. new job, please.
   I had an interview with another ERP company that was developing a web platform full of aux apps in Angular 2. I didn't have to think twice, said goodbye, and went to work there. One year working on the research and development team (me and my boss) working on an Angular + Node project. First time using Trello, writing user stories, using GIT, and all the good stuff that I learned in college but I hadn't the opportunity to apply yet. 
   Again, one year working in that company, that experience allowed me to get into my current company where started working with USA-based clients, distributed, multi-cultural teams with full SCRUM work schema. Today I'm still working there and after 2 years I got a second job doing some freelance stuff in another company, also as an Angular dev. 
	That's my story, my path, maybe is similar (or not) to yours but I wanted to share it in order to, like I said at the beginning of the post, "write something in English", I apologize for the bad grammar and other redaction issues that you as a native or more proficient English user can find. Hopping to hear your story in the comments.