My path to programming wealth

I remember clearly that the year was 1999. I was 21 years old and needed to support my family and raise my 3-month-old daughter. At that time, I was working in a position for people with disabilities, making $8.75 an hour, and I was studying photography at a university. At that time, I was really driven crazy by money. After working diligently for 6 months, I finally got a raise, which was an extra $0.50 per hour. I realized that it was totally impossible to continue like this.

My father is a php programmer. He has always encouraged me to learn programming, but I dedicated my time to computer games. Alas, there were so many opportunities in front of me, but I didn't cherish them. Now I really regret it.

Now that I am the breadwinner of the family, I have responsibilities in my heart, and I realize how wrong I was at that time, which makes me unable to find a good job now. I want to feed my baby daughter expensive organic food, and I want my family to have a house of their own, but I understand that if I stay in this dead-end job, these ideas are just nonsense. . So, I used the money I saved to buy a Power Mac G4 and a 21-inch monitor, which totaled US$1,600. This was definitely a huge expense at the time. I thought my tuition for one year was only US$3,400. My job requires me to work late, so my huge computer keeps me working late, long before my clients are asleep.

ugo Nakamura is a famous digital artist and the first interactive design expert, from whom I came into contact with Flash technology. What amazed me was that the first product I built using Flash allowed users to combine music, video, and code. Although the ActionScript 1 script only has the most basic functions, it helped me complete the development of the product. Although the site is still in its infancy, it is already on track.

I study from Yugo P, Joshua Davis, Todd Purgason and other resources every night. I learn to understand how they design and program. On those nights when stack overflows and bugs aren’t driving me crazy, I’m motivated by being able to create beautiful visual interactive works with my own hands, because it’s far more interesting than building a boring website. This is everything about me. I discovered the secret that keeps me learning and persevering.

But during this period, I still have to work at night, making it difficult for me to see my baby girl during the day. This is unbearable. So I vowed that I must double my income this year, otherwise I will be sorry for my father’s love that has nowhere to show it (laughs). I always remember selling my beloved Fender 1969 Bassman electric guitar amp to pay the bills. What a heroic man!

Three months later, I got my first website client and an internship opportunity at OmSites web design studio. Om Sites web design studio mainly serves local pot dealers. Customers came from all over, but by that time I was basically able to negotiate business independently, and my salary was $10 an hour. Three months later, I was officially hired, and my salary increased to $20 an hour. At this time, I was able to complete a complete design for a local company on my own. I don't know if I'm doing a good job, but I'm doing my best. Gradually, some of my works began to come into everyone's attention. Todd Purgason also praised my design. The webpage I produced for the Olympia Film Festival even won a nomination award.

At a conference in Seattle in the fall of 2000, I met my boss, the VP of Engineering at a new company called Headsprout. Next I moved my little family to Seattle, making $40 an hour, when I was 22 years old. In just over a year, I completely changed the trajectory of my life, all because of learning to code. Not only did I fulfill my vows, my salary doubled, I even exceeded it, my salary quadrupled. And I laid the foundation for my future success. It was learning code that lit up my path forward. $80,000 a year doesn't sound like much now, but if you add in inflation, it equals $109,776.07 today.

What is the point of this story?

- Don’t make excuses not to learn programming. Otherwise, look at me, I learned it when I was very poor and needed to support my family of three. I was already 21 years old at that time and faced all kinds of pressures and difficulties, which are hard to explain in a word. So definitely don’t be lazy!

- School will not teach you how to work hard. Only when you truly enter society will you understand the importance of hard work.

- Taking on a huge project may seem like an impossible task, but you can break it down into its component parts, step by step. For example, when I first went to make a website, it seemed like a fantasy, so I divided my work into making buttons one by one, editing animations one by one, and completing videos one by one, and I finished it bit by bit. This "mission impossible". As the saying goes, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and one step at a time will always lead to the destination.

——Learning code is not just about writing code, it is a kind of abstract logical thinking. Learning to code is a skill, and like other skills, it allows you to program, but it goes beyond programming.

In recent years, almost every entrepreneur has complained that their technology is not up to par, they can’t handle the code, and they need to find a technical partner. That's a really bad excuse. We have many tools available at hand, such as Stack OverFlow, Treehouse, Codeacademy, etc. With the help of these, you can complete your first Rails, Web or iPhone application in a month. Working for a month to change your future career sounds great, it seems like a dream picture is slowly unfolding before our eyes. However, if you want to find a satisfactory technology partner, it will definitely take more than a month. I can guarantee this.

Even if you don’t want to become a full-time programmer, learning to code will have positive implications for hiring and managing people in the future that cannot be ignored. Do you know what hell feels like, when the server crashes and the database cannot be connected while you are writing code? Are you in urgent need of a good programmer but you don’t know if he is qualified? However, if you know some basic knowledge yourself, all these problems can be easily solved.

If someone says he’s too busy, what he really means is that his job is fucking shit.

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