Last time you heard from me was when I moved my life to Habiganj. Since then I haven’t shared much about my work and been keeping myself private for a while. The final nail in the coffin was when I decided to delete all my social media accounts, mainly Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

For those who are with me on Facebook have a little idea that I am now working as a coder, developer or whatever. But here in this post I wanna share my journey from being a blogger to a Software Engineer.

By doing so I hope I can answer some of your questions and maybe help anyone out there who wants to embark on the same path.

I Served as a Web Developer Teacher for Two Years

If you remember, I went to Habiganj and started a web development school, Tamal Anwar’s Academy. Over there I worked as a teacher for two years. I taught the basic skills of WordPress development and web coding.

It was my dream to teach some real people in a real setting. However the lifestyle was not suitable for me. I had to get up early in the morning, get dressed up in formal and travel to the other side of the town to attend my office and class.

Then I had to stay in the office all day wearing formals and talk to my students. During that time I was unable to do any creative or focused work. I had to constantly attend to new people who would come and look for info and the office was right next to a busy street so lots of noises around. I didn’t have any preparations or mindset of the kind of life I am entering so that was hard for me to keep up.

As I was teaching my students how to build websites using drag and drop builders, I was learning programming in JavaScript. I was fascinated about being able to write raw code and build “web applications”. That time I had no idea what that was.

So after completing two years, it was time to take a break from all of this and I decided to shut down the school. I was back to my home sweet home and by this time I had a high-speed broadband internet connection in my room where I can sit in peace and code.

Self-learning Software Development

I told my family that I am gonna take a break from work but actually I was learning how to build full-stack web applications. I would study JavaScript everyday from various sources. I started with PHP but soon I was stuck so I switched to learning NodeJS.

During this time I learned a lot and felt great about it. I would wake up everyday with enthusiasm, start learning various concepts, would code and write blogs about the things I built. It was a great feeling to go from WordPress to fully custom designs.

Soon I made new friends in the developer circle and was making a new name for myself. I even took an opportunity to speak on ReactJS in one of the Facebook Developer Circles.

As I was learning and sharing, I got inquiries from various startups and tech companies. I never realized that I could take a job as a developer in a company when I first started learning to program. I got into a few job interviews and even got an offer from a new startup company. I ended up rejecting that offer because I didn’t felt the offer was right and this is what I would want to do.

After this, I slowly started to distance myself from the Bangladeshi dev community and quit Facebook. This is because it’s mostly filled with people who wanna hire you for no money or even if they pay they will have unreasonable expectations.

That moment I was going deep into programming and was interested to learn more. I came across an online university course and decided to enroll in it.

Back to School Doing a Computer Science Degree

So instead of joining a startup company as a Software Engineer, I choose to do a four-year-long CS degree. I still don’t know whether I did the right thing, but time will tell.

I took this opportunity to learn computer science the right way, and I was right. After doing just one year of CS, I learned so much about programming and software engineering, that I couldn’t have learned it on my own.

I mostly kept this a secret because I never thought I would be able to follow through with the curriculum and requirements due to my inability to follow routines. As time went by, I passed the uni requirements and became an official degree-seeking student at the University of the People. So far I have earned 21 credits out of 120 and have a 3.5 CGPA.

Got a Part-Time Job

After waiting a bit I eventually got a job that pays well and not as demanding as other startups. The best part is, my boss is a great guy and he is mentoring me about the corporate stuff. The company I am working with is not a tech company and has Billions of dollars of yearly revenue.

My job is to build web-based tools to automate many of the current processes. This way I can relax, do the work I love and also focus on my other commitments.

I even got a laptop sent by my company to do this job since I get repeated power cuts in my area.

My Gaming Side

In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown phase, I got super depressed thinking about life and death. That time I quickly finished my term studies and took a leave of absence from the university. Incidentally, I got an invite from Facebook Gaming, which is a new gaming live streaming platform from Facebook. I took the opportunity to give it a try.

Before that I was playing games whenever I got the chance and always wanted to share my fun gaming moments with others. I opened a gaming page and started streaming to the world. It was a hit and people seemed to enjoy my gameplays.

It was refreshing to play my favorite games and also be a source of support for many people during the lockdown. As of today, I am doing pretty well with my gaming page and it has over 25 thousand followers with over millions of video views. Nowadays when I go live I get hundreds of people watching me at the same time.

What’s Next?

The reason for me to share all this with you was to self reflect on how far I have come. Over the next five years I want to finish my CS degree and become a real software engineer. Although you don’t need a degree to be one, for me it’s a journey that I want to take.

I wanna be a source of inspiration to let you know that even some 30+ year old guy with no science or math background can learn and make it.

Blogging has been a huge part of my success because after sharing my journey, I was able to connect with lots of people who brought me so many opportunities. Gaming and online video creation is the new avenue I am finding great success, so I will keep that as a side gig.

So that’s what I was working on for the last five years.

Now it’s your turn.

Let me know what you have been up to?

Leave a comment, send me a message or even email me at hello [at] tamalweb [dot] com

The post My Journey from a Blogger to a Software Engineer, And What I have Been Up to for The Last 5 Years appeared first on BlogKori.