My name is Liam and I'm 27 years old.
My entire life I've struggled to find a passion or a drive to push me to want to be something and do something.
Honestly I struggled a lot in school. I procrastinated all the time, but afraid of failure, so I would do well enough out of fear, but couldn't focus on the right things in life. This left me feel stunted, confused, and lost in life. I thought everyone felt like this and I was just lagging behind.
Like many in this industry, I played a lot of video games, my pc is my entertainment system, and I always thought computers were cool. Though I have a low self-esteem when it came to what I thought I was capable of, after taking C++ and C# in community college, I thought it wasn't for me. I had a lot of fun, but struggled a lot thinking I wasn't good or smart enough. I eventually opted to go for nursing and that ended up just as well you you'd think. I have nothing but an associates degree to my name. This led me to feel like I had exhausted funds, would have to go back and do other classes if I wanted to steer into something else, I felt defeated and lost.
I was only recently diagnosed with ADHD almost a year ago, now medicated, and a lot of my questions were answered on how and why I struggled so much in school and tasks in general. I wonder the man I could have been by now if I were diagnosed and didn't have this confusing hurdle in my life. I started to self-learn coding after college and found it difficult to stick to it. My ADHD made it crippling to do things I wanted to do, knew was good for me, but couldn't get myself to do it. This led to a inconsistent back and fourth of coding.
However, coming back, feeling like I have more control in my life, I picked it back up, with a new attitude on life. I went back to the basics again with JavaScript and trying to build a sense of confidence and competence in my abilities before I go back to React and building more grandiose projects. It's scary to feel like you have no path in life and so you try to move so fast to catch up, you end up feeling like a fraud. Coming back to the basics and really getting to understand the fundamentals has been a big help in my coding anxiety.
What is my goal? My ultimate goal is to be able to work remotely, ideally, and move to Canada. Or be able to move to Canada and offer my skills!
Here's to learning new things, enjoying that fun, and making something of yourself!
The last project I made was a little blackjack game that is played strict just through node with no real interaction(https://github.com/liamdewitt/blackjack-game), but serves to exercise what I knew at the time. Since then, I've been learning more and plan for a new project soon and looking forward to the struggle and learning pains that follow :)!