A bit of context

So how does a boy from Adelaide — by way of very rural South Australia — end up in Sydney in a coding bootcamp? Like most things in my life it’s complicated. The chronology of the story is all over the place too, so this post is going to read a bit like a Tarantino film (but hopefully with way more original content).

A couple of years ago I was bored: crippling ennui, existential dread, capital B B O R E D. I’d just been passed over for promotion, my job felt increasingly sisyphean, I could practically feel my brain atrophying. Maybe this was just a melodramatic way of dealing with turning twenty nine, but whatever it was I needed a change in my life. By a stroke of incredible good fortune I met someone amazing who has immeasurably changed my life for the better. There was a whirlwind romance: we were constantly back and forth between Adelaide and Sydney; they constantly kicked my ass to become a better version of myself, making me commit to doing something with my life; we shared passions and goals, tech was a huge common interest. During one of our frequent, 3am rapid fire conversations we started talking about coding and how it was something I was infatuated with as a kid.

As is probably very common, especially for people socialised as male, my first encounter with coding was through video games. At eight or nine I was obsessed with — but terrible at — real time strategy games. Looking for ways to cheat, I found guides on editing the .ini files with notepad; the game only crashed a couple of times. This led to me discovering QBasic and the default games that came preinstalled, “Nibbles” et al. Later on I got heavily into freeware games and mods, and the internet communities surrounding them. Growing up in a very small town can be isolating for anyone, being a weird kid who isn’t great at sports only exacerbates the isolation. So finding a whole group of people with the same interests as me was a revelation. I was lucky enough to run into an online community that was very supportive and encouraging, so I found myself contributing — in a very basic way — to the weekly news section of a gaming website. It was around this time that I began to experience a lot of external pressure to not persue this interest. My parents’ constant refrain of “you need to get off that computer and spend more time outside” was well intentioned, but in conjunction with my teachers telling me to think about a more “realistic” career path and my classmates relentless bullying it built up a kind of mental block that has been a challenge to deconstruct.

Flash forward to 2018, I’m still feeling jaded and bored selling computers at [REDACTED] — also hey anyone from [REDACTED] who wants to hire me as a dev, I was a great fit in your company — but my partner has enrolled in this really exciting coding bootcamp course. It was a weird mix of pride in their accomplishments, envy of their ability to be so steadfast in achieving their goals, and excitement at the possibilities that this kind of intense career focused learning opened up that led me to getting my affairs in order and enrolling myself. It took a little longer than I would have liked, but I made it in time for the 2019 intake. I quit my job, sublet my room in Adelaide and paid a small fortune for six months accomodation in Sydney: but here I am — all in.

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