How I went from security guard to back-end developer in a year

Photo credit: Simon Abrams.

As a kid, I was in love with computers. But my scores on college entrance exams weren’t high enough to get me into a computer-related field, so I studied mining engineering.

After one particularly bad semester where I failed my courses, I decided to take a summer job as a security guard to make some money. That summer job went on to become my career.

You don’t need to be a particularly clever person to work as a security guard in Spain. So, the people in your life start to have lower expectations of you and, after a while, you start to have lower expectations of yourself. You stop trying to improve as a person.

But something different was destined to happen to this particular security guard.

I was working my 400th event as a security guard at Campus Madrid. I’d settled into the job a year earlier and, a few months ago, my wife had given birth to our son.

So, there I was on campus, surrounded by so many ambitious entrepreneurs. I saw them taking risks and making moves while I felt trapped in a dead-end job, trying to make ends meet for my growing family.

During the event, one speaker took the stage and said something that changed my life forever: “Anyone can learn to code and work as a developer.” I was skeptical of his claims and was ready to dismiss this statement as marketing. But what if he was right? What if I could also learn to code and work with computers instead of standing around all day as a security guard?

In Spain, “knowledge worker” jobs are reserved for people who have a university degree. But the speaker was saying that due to the incredible demand for software developers, employers were making exceptions. You just have to be good enough at coding to pass a barrage of coding challenges and interviews.

I researched his claims and found that what he said wasn’t just marketing or hype but was indeed rooted in the economics of the time. That’s when I made my decision. I was going to become a developer—whatever it took.

Looking for courses

I didn’t have time to waste, so I set out to piece together the best way to learn code. I started asking my developer friends in Campus Madrid, such as Carlos Hernandez, CEO at Gamify. I kept searching the web and jumping from resource to resource. Every day, I tried a bit of a new course I’d found.

Then, I talked with Daniel Mery, the founder of a local Haskell meetup. He was confident that I could learn to code for free using open-source resources. I took his advice and tried FreeCodeCamp.

My mistakes

I’d like to say that from that point on, I made the smartest decisions and took the shortest paths to a developer job. But the truth is, I made some mistakes. The biggest mistake was that I didn’t finish what I started.

When I started learning to code, I was learning really fast. The beginning honeymoon stage was amazing and I felt like the king of the hill. So when I encountered a problem that I couldn’t quickly solve, I didn’t bother with it. I wanted to keep moving faster, so I kept moving forward, trying to learn more and more. As a result, I had lots of half-solved problems and half-built projects.

Taking the next step

Joining a community

Landing the job

My first on-the-job experience

In conclusion