I am a web developer in an average French city. The kind of city where you can find a few notable tech companies, but where most of the jobs are indeed subcontracting for generic companies like postal service, agri-food, banks, more or less useful mobile app for niche markets startups and stuff like this. A few hundred thousands inhabitants. No industry. A low GDP per habitant and a really high unemployment rate made many of my neighbors probably dependent on the welfare. I have been. For one year and a half. An eternity, during which the desire of production reached the critical mass. This is my journey to becoming a productive, upper-category engineer proficient at sought-after skills like DevOps, big data, machine learning and cloud / application scalability, mastering english language and able to work anywhere in the world.

Where I am now

I’m around 30 years old and folks, I won’t lie : I lost some time. I graduated from university at age 22, with only a bachelor in hand, in a passionating but non-profitable History diploma. I wasn’t hard working. I was unable to earn any money back in these days, or even to get a summer job in a town saturated with students and young immigrant workers. From age 22 to 24, I attended an IT private school after reading about the creation of a brand new one in Paris : 42. I haven’t made it to this temple of different-thinking working ascets, but thanks to my parents I could afford the local IT school, which, I’m ashamed to say, was below my expectations. I still met students more talented (and younger) than me, willing to share their knowledge and enthusiasm, and I had the honor of being part of the “elite 4” students of my class with special access to the “secret” fablab stage. But I was carried by faster brains than mine and the desire of creating something awesome, of taking my revenge on the years I lost not acting and underestimating myself remained a mere dream. I graduated with a basic IT diploma at age 24, and started working a few months later.

From age 24 to 27-28, until Covid-19 hit, I was a first class (in the military sense of it, a soldier without any grade) and my goal, after personal life hazard during the pandemic, is to become top class engineer because both my intellect and my personal goals in life ask for it. Expertise and money have to rise hand in hand in the years to come, and for that I need to understand why my carreer did not take off until now.

Here are some facts

– I started my carreer earning barely 1.5 time the minimum legal wage of my country, while having a double diploma.

– This wage almost did not progress in 2 years. When I left my first long-term company on purpose, I understood I was about to be fired for insufficient performance. I had to justify my actions and skills beyond normal in my last weeks.

– My wage suddenly went up by 1000 euros or so when I moved to a parisian company. It made me euphoric and I felt like the king of the world, but didn’t know where to start to build a engineer skill set in this more competitive environment. This ended up in procrastination, which was less the case in my first company due to junior dev initial learning.

– Since I left Paris due to the pandemic, I never really retrieved the stimulating smell of challenge. I struggled with personal issues and was carried either by all my coworkers during my onboarding first weeks, or by the main partner I worked with. I feel sorry for him. But also for me. I eventually got fired after a 1:1 interview with my manager, announcing that my skills would be tested as if I was a 20 yo work-study junior. From this came a new deterioration of my life, goals and dreams.

– Now I work again, more motivated than ever. I finally managed to become hard-working (at least in my company’s standards, for sure) but I know I won’t bear the bank’s bureaucracy, conformism and wait-and-seeism forever. I brings food on the table, but when I’ll reach the right velocity in my personnal projects -my true benchmark, 100% technical and 0% ass-kissing- I’ll go for an industry I’m craving for, that is space. I won’t explain here why space is cool. If you don’t see it, you’re lost.

I’m also curious about the world, love talking in english and want to have an international personnal life. This takes money. This takes skills if I want to work as a well-skilled immigrant in Asia, for example. I don’t want all my words to disappear like tears in the rain this time. This is why I’m gonna log my progresses (and crashes) here. My joys and struggles on the road to higher efficiency, better skill sharing with my peers, better cooperation and communication (cause soft skills matters) in a word to more intelligence in my life.

I probably won’t remain a developer all my life, because I have even bigger passions than that. But while I’m at it and because life decided I need my self-esteem back, and some money too, I will accept the challenge. Beyond the possible ego trip of being able to automate website productions from CLI or to code a C++ videogame, I’ll do it for the ones I love. To give back to my loved ones and to society part of all they gave to me.

Initial opiniated views

– ERGONOMY RULES. I’d rather spend a few hours having a performant environment than a messy IDE configuration. And no more crappy debugging. I’ll forget about the die() and all of this and will use a proper step debugger everywhere I work. Everything must be set up so that information comes up to me. The computer being the extension of my brain, I want its wiring to be impeccable.

– TRANSPARENCY RULES. I want everything to be tracked. From branch and commits naming to comments on tickets. Lead devs (and I want to be one some day) and managers (no way for this one) must be unable to say that they didn’t know about what happened or what I did.

– No 35-hours (or so) dogma. Fact is that I can’t help being a bit perfectionist, and it makes me work slower than average. Unfortunately I don’t have much work to train on these days, but if it happens I wouldn’t mind working 40 hours a week. Still way below other countries’ standards. When my trial period is over I’ll happily charge it to the client.

– Focus on tech skills upgrading for now. I already am a freelance theorically, but to spare myself administrative burden I am in salary portage. This is a tradeoff for my peace of mind, given how hard is it to be an entrepreneur in France.

– I want to develop skills that are wanted first, not the ones I dream the most of (typically, develop a video game). Video games industry management sucks and it fires people these days. Devops, big data and cloud hire. Realism about the industry is a virtue. The goal is to be useful and customer-centric, not to be self-centric. Even if I still want to be at the space industry’s service eventually, and it will have a big growth in the future IMO.

I’m aware than I look like I’m trying to make a normal job look epic. Maybe. I’ve come a long way from endless procrastination and I started to kill it and to aim beyond normal workload, because normal is too low and that I believe I have somewhat good potential. So let’s prove it starting next month.