One day a persistent thought comes to your mind: "how everything got me, I want to do anything but not this." If a person is intelligent enough and decisive - then he will take and do just that. And if not so much, it will take years to drag the bagpipes and whine about how it all turned up. I'm just from the last category.

Why all this

Once there came a certain turning point when it was necessary to change something in the monotonous working life and return to the pleasant brain of vigorous activity. You know, when you somehow come to the office in the morning, you flop into a chair and you realize that patience has run out and this cozy comfort zone will no longer be rolling.

At first I decided to start everything with a plan in my head and a worthy goal before my eyes. Reasoned very simply: I want my own home away from the city, and not to old age. That is, over the next 5 years, they would need to acquire without a mortgage.

Simple mathematics with the analysis of the real estate market and its growth rates clearly showed that for this you need to earn about 250t.r. per month. It is a real salary if you are a big boss or an incredibly cool developer. The first option had to be dropped due to the lack of "natural fat", and the second is quite real if two conditions are met:

• It will still be interesting to develop the next N years. If you are not interested, you will never be better than the average programmer. And average programmers do not get the desired income plan;

  
  
• There is a minimum of 3 years left to climb the career ladder, approximately equal to Senior Developer.

Well, 3 years of buildup pushes the cherished 5 years to the goal, but still do not exclude it completely. So for the cause.

What I tried and what worked

I was always interested in mobile platforms and competent interfaces, so I didn’t break my head about the direction of development and decided to become a developer for iOS / Android. Like other beginners, he succumbed to the slogans of “programming is simple” and just started watching video tutorials with practical examples. Something worked out, but in my head there was no understanding of what was happening inside the program, and why it is worth doing this way and not otherwise.

In the first wave of desire to become a programmer, I watched lessons on iOS development. Objective-C seemed to make it easier to dive into basic knowledge of C , and the apple company liked the products. But in practice, the language was extremely tricky and illogical, and the documentation of Apple - not adapted for the beginner. In addition, at that time, Swift was already introduced and Objective-C began its planned sunset.

By the way, the C language was also taught not at school or at the institute. I just somehow got carried away with the topic of smart watches, bought Pebble Steel and my hands itched to assemble my own dial or some useful application. If anyone does not know, Pebble SDK is based on the C language and offers CloudPebble as an IDE cloud development tool .

Suddenly I discovered a very easy-to-start platform with detailed and visual documentation . At the very least, it became obvious that they allowed a significant part of the design budget to support the developers. There, of course, the basics were also needed, so I sat down to read “We study Sy” by the excellent author A. Krupnik. They wrote it right somewhere that if such teachers worked at the institute, there would be more good programmers.

Under this watch I wrote several dials (for example, named after the Prague airport RUZN pixelate ) and even managed to participate in a small commercial project at Upwork, which brought additional knowledge and confidence in their abilities.

Love is gone, withered apples

I never thought that an Apple appleman with the experience is able to get off the Apple platform. But it happened, and I was fascinated by the logical world of Material Design of the new Android. In addition, Google has a very loyal policy with respect to new developers: they don’t demand any money at all and offer a lot of tutorials and online Udacity courses . Only one problem - you need to learn Java.

Back then, Java seemed to me to be something incredibly ugly and only capable of terrible Symantec-style interfaces from the distant past. But the language turned out to be much more in common with the already beloved C than that of Objective-C. It was the third attempt to become a programmer, so I did not rely on simple tutorials and signed up for the JavaRush course. This seemed insufficient, and I became a student again.

A student in the sense that he entered Java development courses at ITMO University in St. Petersburg. Well, what, this is the famous forge of the best programmers, right? Must understand the question better than anyone. Here is my first serious miscalculation - it did not take into account that the ITMO training center and the university itself have only a building and some teachers in common.

If I had climbed into HeadHunter earlier and looked at the requirements for teachers of this forge of programmers, I wouldn’t spend time and money. The teacher never answered any of the more or less serious questions, so the students themselves helped each other. In a word, only the official certificate of completion of the courses and the final disappointment in everything that is at least somehow connected with higher education were taken from the useful.

Amigo, brother

With JavaRush came out more interesting. He pecked at the fact that the course is completely online, it takes more than 80% of the time practice, and developed it a good programmer. I will not engage in advertising, you yourself can read more about the project, if you're interested. Let me just say that closer to level 10 there already appears a complete feeling that you are being seriously taught to develop using modern tools like IntelliJ IDEA.

So I shook the remaining budget after training at ITMO and issued a paid subscription. I especially like their manner of occasionally giving you tasks on topics that have not yet been studied in the course. They are trained to tinker with third-party documentation, search for answers on the forums and reach the truth on their own. I am sure that not everyone will like this training scheme, but I personally appreciated it. At least in Core Java began to feel more confident than after the full-time course.

When the theoretical fundamentals got stronger, I started poking around on my own in the Android Developer Studio, watching video tutorials and code my calculator. In general, I wanted to create the perfect multimedia processor for cars based on OEM hardware. I still keep this idea in my head and some day I will definitely come back to it with my own development team.

The JavaRush project has a lot of published stories on "how I bought JavaRush and realized the dream", but I personally have not yet realized the dream and still just move to the title Junior Developer. But no, I'm not moving now, as I climbed into marketing.

Because circumstances are stronger than us.

He quit his main job, where he managed to sit back (which is something) and at the same time receive additional income from working in freelancing. I decided not to look for a new office, but to plunge into private practice. So I came to marketing and realized that the organization of work on the project itself is more interesting to me than the project itself. Every time you come across a new rake and scrape a small business, work with people, learn to defend a position. In general, while I stopped in this direction and after almost two years I cannot say that I regretted it.

A great movie on startups to lift the mood

But this story is not about the fact that everyone urgently needs to run to businessmen. Rather, it’s about the fact that you shouldn’t waste your time on thought-throwing - sometimes you just need to take and break everything. On the ruins it is much easier to build a new house than to build extensions at the old hut.

If you also had a chance to experience something like a professional burnout , share your story in the comments. A unique collection of rakes is always more interesting than a glossy success story, right?