Hello world, my name is Ryan Barnes and I am an aspiring software developer from Oklahoma City.
A quick background; I was born and raised in the OKC metro and spent the first 25 years of my life trying to figure out why I was still here. Luckily enough I accepted a job as a traveling Audio/Video technician where, in 2008, I met my now beautiful wife. Somehow we have managed to become full fledged adults (whatever that means) and even parents. -yikes-
The a/v job required extensive travel so when my wife and I started dating I found a "career" that would keep me closer to home. In 2008 I landed a job with Chesapeake Energy and I thought that I had struck gold! The money that this place threw around was amazing (and unrealistic). After almost 10 turbulent years at Chesapeake I was exhausted by the O&G market. In 2018 I accepted a job with a local John Deere equipment dealer where things certainly had to be smoother, right?!? That was right until shit hit the fan in 2020 and that leads me to where I am today.
The pandemic brought a lot of different things to a head for many people across the world and I was one of them. I was sick of the corporate BS, tired of everything being me vs you, and just simply exhausted. I needed a change.
Several years ago I tried my hand at insurance claims adjusting, catastrophic claims specifically, so when I was thinking about my next career path I felt like I should include insurance in the conversation. I had also been researching and there is a ton of tech related positions with exponential growth opportunities and remote work available as well. While the tech prospect was attractive, that was going to be a much steeper hill to climb than a field that I had previous history. I chose the insurance route but this time as an Agent in hopes that I could eventually own my own agency. I learned, in pretty short order, that a role in sales is not a good fit for me or my finances.
In December 2021 I started circling back around to the tech industry career idea. I watched a lot of videos, Twitter searches, and of course Googling and was really drawn to the prospect of software development. I bought a full stack course on Udemy that I worked on for a couple of weeks until I hit the wall of "I have so many questions and no one to answer them!" at which time I put on my dress pants and tie and started knocking on doors. I went to two different local companies and told them my story and asked for their advise. I mostly wanted to know if what I was attempting was stupid or if it was truly doable. I was offered some great advice but both of them said "It doesn't matter what degree you have, what certification you have... if you are going to be a dev you just have to know your stuff!". While that was great to know it still left me drowning in a sea of information to learn via the internet. I checked into a local bootcamp but decided that spending $15k this early in the journey was probably not the best move so I signed up for a full stack course through Treehouse and that is where I am at today. They provide some level of online support or questions and you have a project at the end of each module that is graded. So far so good but I am just scratching the surface in JS so wish me the best!
I am excited to be on this journey and I am thankful for the techlahoma community and all of the resources on the internet for development. I am just trying not to drown in all of the opportunity!