You're probably wondering who I am, well for starters, my name is Victor Tran, and I am 30.721 years old. I live in Largo, FL (Tampa Bay area for those still unsure). I started my web development journey in 2013, when I was still in high school. I was relatively new and was using a WYSIWYG editor (Adobe Dreamweaver at the time) to code. I honestly wasn't very good.

I went to college for web development starting in 2013 and I actually never received my diploma. The curriculum was not the best. I learned Python, Java, and then intro to web development (only the html/css portion). They also taught about history/art and a ton of other useless courses, like who cares? It was then that I realized that colleges don't really teach you what's needed to be a web developer.

I left college in 2017 behind and went to become a self taught programmer. I researched online and found multiple resources, such as codeacademy, udemy, freecodecamp, team treehouse, udacity. I ended up going through each resource and learned something new each time. To be honest, programming didn't click for me until 2017, when I was enrolled in a nonprofit organization's coding bootcamp.

That nonprofit's name was LaunchCode, and I took on their LC101. I graduated from their bootcamp in April 2018, but no job. I didn't get a job because the area that I live in is very centered around two languages that I didn't want to code in, C# and Java. I learned both of those languages (more C# than java), but ultimately, I didn't want to code in it. I also dabbled in JavaScript during my last few months in LaunchCode, and I fell in love with the language.

I've been coding in mostly JavaScript now, both in the front using React and it's html-like JSX tags, and the back with NodeJS runtime environment along with Express/Apollo Server. I would say the reason I haven't gotten a job is the ridiculous requirements tech jobs place for a 'junior' role. It's like the department that wrote the requirements don't know what they're talking about asking for a front end developer skilled in NodeJS/AWS/.NET/Go lang. That coupled with the low-balled rates some companies want to hire for even the though the potential ROI is huge. They say "being cheap is expensive", so maybe it might be best to learn a thing or two from Boeing.