It was a cold and foggy night in the backstreets of Istanbul. A night worthy enough to bring a legend of 100 years in the making to its dawn. A young man was walking with haste and some blood on his fez.
Okay, maybe not this cool, but the story of how I started coding is not bad in itself.
Getting into Tech
I was very eager to start a business in my college years. The process of working on something for endless hours with no foreseeable outcome and seeing a handful of people interact with it was always fun, in a more sadistic way. Making business plans and talking to people was the part I practiced the most. Creating the actual product, was my brick wall. I've tried many things like creating mockup apps in inVision (which is something you need to try if you need a quick app demo), finding freelancers online to create the basic functionality or giving people shares to be a part of the idea. Some worked and more often than not, some didn't.
After my latest failure, which was a health tech SaaS managed to work with Bayer and Eczacıbaşı but failed to grow, my technology partner offered to go and work with him. At the time, I was pretty exhausted from all the uncertainties and hustle. It would be a nice break and I could learn about software world as a plus.
So as a mechanical engineer grad, I started working at a software company as a project manager.
It wasn't an easy thing to do for me, and it wasn't an easy place to do it. Had to spend countless hours to learn about tech stacks, frameworks, languages. For god's sake, I went to the lead backend engineer to fix the image size on the page at one point.
I had the opportunity to learn a great deal of stuff for all that hard work. Which is something I'll always be grateful for. I am still in contact with my former boss and we are pretty good friends.
Learning Coding
When pandemic started, I had some foundational knowledge about coding from work already. Since I did not lose any time going to the office or being stuck in traffic between meetings, I had a lot of free time to myself. As a PM with no technical background, you can have some pretty hard time leading teams and talking to clients about their projects. So, why not learn some to make my day easier? At this point, I've already tried to learn coding 5 times. Starting HTML on your own could be challenging since you can not comprehend how this will be used when you start building actual stuff. Swift is not a language like that. You can see what you will be creating after 3-4 hours of work. I learned most programming concepts with Swift.
Phasing Into Professionalism
After I've started to correct code snippets developers were sending, I knew it was time to quit. The pandemic was in its peak, businesses were shutting down and cutting costs. You are a junior developer who is in need of a job, and you can not change the difficulty from game settings. One of my friends had a startup, which was not making money, with some experienced developers . They needed the manpower and I needed the lessons, it was a nice bargain. I moved to Antalya where they were working at the time, a beautiful city located in southern Turkey. Now, this startup was an extreme sports startup. They were staying in tents, going climbing in lunch breaks and having meetings in the forest. A peculiar way to learn the most digital craft one can do.