I said I would give more details…here they are. There is a lot to this topic and in telling it I may skip around a bit as the thoughts come out, bear with me or just treat it like a wonderful puzzle!

Just a few months ago, I was a consultant for the largest professional services firm in the world. I had been doing that work for about 5 years and had gotten enough certifications to my name for it to appear on 2 lines on a business card! Doesn’t that sound like an exciting goal???

Two whole lines!!!

At one point that goal was very important to me. As time went on, I became very dissatisfied with this job/career. It was not fulfilling. Most of my clients didn’t seem to care that we were there. It was more for them to say that we were there than the actual work we produced. I wanted to actually affect my clients, to bring real value to their business. Unfortunately, I believe this had a lot to do with my clients and projects and was not wholly the fault of the firm or industry. Still, the firm didn’t care much about that as long as the client was paying and kept engaging us. I also had a hard time overall with the amount of travel that was required; missing spending time with my girlfriend, with my friends, missing soccer games, and simply not spending time where I was paying rent. However, this more or less affected me mostly after I had already made my big decision because I was traveling more and more as time went on. It simply reinforced my thoughts.

With all of this, it became clear to me that I needed to make a change. When reviewing in my head of what I could possibly do, it occurred to me to look at my past and what I had used to enjoy.

That was…. programming.

When I was a kid, I had taught myself visual basic and tried to learn C++ by myself, though that ended badly as any budding developer can attest to. I was discouraged by this difficulty and prospects of a stereotypical programmer and abandoned my interests at the time.

Coming back to the present, I thought, ‘why not’. I was interested then, why not now? Something must have been there for me to have tried to do that on my own without any ‘adult’ influence.

So I decided to see where that interest came from. Was it my innate inquisitive nature? Do I like to take things apart and put things together? To solve problems? Why? Why? Why? (As my girlfriend can tell you, I ask “why” a lot.) I like to learn and understand how and why things are the way they are. Programming allows me to work on and solve a real problem and see the solution. These were not things that were usually available in my consulting experiences. I love the little high you get when you finally solve a programming problem and it works. You can see for yourself, your very own solution and it WORKS, right there in front of your face. What’s better than that!?

So obviously I begin my pursuit of this new idea, this new career.

Oh but there is just so much to learn and understand, wherever do you begin?

Stay tuned…