Another Hello World!
Tags: beginners, career, webdev, help
Published: 2019-06-30 04:53:57

---
title: Another Hello World!
published: true
description: My first post on dev.to, and my first foray into professional development 
tags: #beginner, #career, #webdev, #help
---

Hey Dev.to!

I just finished putting together my portfolio (which you can find [here](https://ahernandez.glitch.me/)), and I figured now would be the oppurtune time to start networking with other devs!

To put it simply, I've been programming as a hobby since I was in high-school. I never met any other scientists or techies until I got to college (the first in my family to do so), so I was lacking in direction as to how to continue forward in a career in software development. After gaining a lot of confidence from partaking in science internships and working a short government-contracted job surrounded by scientists, I now feel I have the conviction to enter the world of professional programming, and make a career out of my coding knowledge. 

After I was done with college (only finishing the first half of a bachelors in Computer Engineering), I began to take coding seriously in my free time. Unfortunately, I was scatter brained in my approach, working on side projects that used new and experimental frameworks, namely in the realm of cryptocurrency. First was Cosmos Sdk during last summer, and while I appreciate the experience I gained in Golang, I realized the shortcomings of the framework in simply creating a dapp that could be easily adopted. 

Afterwards, I moved onto Hyperledger Fabric, using Hyperledger Composure for its claims to easily set up a production ready blockchain. Shortly after, the dev team announced they would be halting further development to focus on Fabric, and there went my enthusiasm to finish my project with Composer.

Finally I landed on Truffle.js, for developing on the Ethereum ecosystem. There I completed the project [you can see on my portfolio](https://ahernandez.glitch.me/), an Ethereum gift card that was a birthday present for my mother. 

Although there are quite a few projects left unfinished with frameworks that are still under development, I appreciate the experience because it got me used to working with experimental apis that would change week to week, or sometimes didn't even behave how the official documentation claimed!

I also had the joy of learning Clojure and Clojurescript (and converted to an emacs fanboy), and thankfully I can say my time with those languages have been more fruitful, since I plan on publishing those projects on my portfolio in the coming week.

However, in an attempt to take a more grounded and normal approach to becoming a professional dev, I've been re-familiarizing myself with node and react, and have a full website published on glitch.com which [you can find here](https://chow-chow-shop.glitch.me/). 

I have quite a few projects I plan to finally publish soon to, for example some scripts in my .zshrc file that spice up my linux workflow.

So, seeing as how I am still a newbie, I am asking you, audience of dev.to, for any possible help or critique you could give me! Maybe [check out my glitch projects](https://glitch.com/@BleedingEffigy/production-ready). And feel free to give me tips on personal development, or any leads on job openings you know of. In the meantime, I'll be browsing through freelancer and indeed.

Thanks for reading all the way through.