My name is Will and I do NOT consider myself a coder, but a future hopeful. However, even at the age of 45 with 3 kids, a full time career (not anywhere near coding) and a pretty busy life, I've decided that something I've been toying around with for literal decades is something that MAYBE, just maybe, I might be able to consider as a future.

Even now as I start to write my first blog, I realize how much of a newbie I must be to anyone who might consider reading this. This will probably not be the typical tech blog, full of the usual items from those well versed in programming. However, I'm doing this for my own personal journey into coding and anyone who might be crazy enough to travel along with me on this journey and possibly be inspired to do the same.

A bit of background, I started with computers in the 80s and you probably know what that means, archaic and interesting to say the least. I started messing around at the age of 8 or so either playing with my Atari 2600, using tape drives on Radio Shack computers and learning with basic coding on IBM computers to create simple programs to make moving shapes and such dance on the screen. However, that was short lived and I quickly moved away from programming, while still continuing to be active in computers all throughout my life.

I had many stops and starts over the next few decades toying with the idea, however, it wasn't as easy to do online learning as it is now, especially if you weren't a CS major in college and paying the bills immediately took a front seat. I did not go into CS, but another, unrelated major. Over the last several years, I took a more serious approach to this and have been looking to really get into it, but felt completely lost and "too old" to NOW learn to code and translate that into a career.

Starting in 2017, I found FreeCodeCamp.org and it seemed like a great place to start to dive into this and see if it was something I really wanted to do. I went through the beginning content for a while and again stopped and started over the last few years, mostly trying to overcome the thoughts I was too old and trying to convince myself that this was something I could really do, even in some sort of freelance/side gig method, instead of trying to transition to a full time career.

Over the next few posts, I'll explain a bit more of these past experiences I've had and to go into more detail of what I've done specifically over the last few years and what my plan is going forward. As I go through my personal experiences trying to learn coding through a self paced, self learning process, I'll take you along with me.