Hey, that's a good question thanks for asking

How did I end up studying IT

I will quickly go over my school career before university which was not an achievement and even less an example. What you have to remember is that I can be so passionate that I spend hours working on something, but I can also be lazy to have a hard time getting things done in time.

So how did I end up studying IT? sorry, but it was a default choice because I have never been really inspired or dreamed about a specific job. I guess I'm lucky because I liked it but only after 2 years of hard work to understand something^^ I mean I had a Mac at home since I was 17 to play World of Warcraft and nothing before that so we can't say I was destined to become a developer lol.

Of course, I created/configured some forum-actif for my Ogame alliance and I remembered that the color code was secret to update the alliance page on Ogame with HTML/markdown. So I guess I was a developer since that time but I didn't know it yet. I let you imagine how I felt the first time I opened Windows or Linux terminal and I ran the matrix command.

The university path of knowledge

Actually when I entered the university in 2012 which was a pretty big year

• The year of the end of the world,
• Gangnam Style, the first youtube video to achieve billions of views
• The very beginning of streaming content with Twitch.tv
• The 4G network for mobile

But at that time I had no idea of what was made this new adventure that I was invited to begin.

I had a very hard time learning and understanding language and concept like programming in C (memory, pointer, and tab), object programming (Java), and database. But I realized that your classmates become your team in a way that at the university when you are a newcomer in the world of IT you can't do everything alone and you have to rely on and help other classmates to pass exams and projects you do in groups.

The IT world was like an infinite well of knowledge that I could dive into with my friends. And that's probably why I have really liked doing hackathons since 2012 such as "La nuit de l'info" or "the global game jam".

Having fun programing

The other skill I have is to make parallels with other passions I have such as music or the Japanese language.

For example, when I think of music, I can imagine it as an iterative code such as C. If I had to program a song, it would be written like this plus you imagine this for every musical instrument and lyrics.

function mySong() {
    intro();
    block();
    block();
    bridge();
    solo();
    block();
    end();
}

function block() {
    verse();
    chorus();
}

function verse() {
    for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
        chord A B C D
    }
}

function chorus() {
    for(int i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
        chord E F G G
    }
}

...

Same idea for Japanese, there are hiragana and katakana syllabaries plus kanjis.

Every kanji sound can be written with hiragana and you can use it to create different words.

火 => pronounced "KA" and means "fire"
火曜日 => pronounced "KAYOUBI" and means "Tuesday"
火山 => pronounced "KAZAN" and means "volcano"

Some kanji can be used as a decorator like in this example about the "leader" kanji 長 that can also be used for the words "ship captain", "the mayor", "the store manager", etc

Anyway, I am probably the crazy one here for who that makes perfect sense. For every activity created by men's minds, there are some systems to organize data.

First job and impostor syndrome

At the end of my master's, I did an internship in a big IT service company before entering a full-time job there. The year before was the first time I went to japan with a university exchange so I came back in a "yes-man" mood to try anything new and that's how I came up working on a project using an ERP / low-code with an offshore team in India.

It has been a very nice experience to work with people who think and work differently based on the culture and also I improved my English skills during that job. But the tech was pissing me off because any time you want to do something simple, you cannot without breaking the best practice, and every time you think the feature is impossible to do, then you have a checkbox to tick and it's done -_-.

A few years later I decided to move to Japan to find a job! Guess when? Yeah, 2019, the covid year of course!! For the first time, I was on my own, on the other side of the earth, panicking about not finding an IT job in Japan before the end of my visa and I guess I was just experimenting with what a lot of people do to move out from there country for all the reason they can have.

It's been a while since I haven't been under pressure, passing dev-test and interviews in English / Japanese (I think this is what I am the proudest of about this year). I restarted to learn a bit of every language/framework just to stay and work in Japan but I realized that companies don't want to hire people who are average in a lot of fields but they are most likely to hire technical experts.

There comes the impostor syndrome, I let you google it if you don't know. But in the end "actions" matter, so at the end of 2020 I came back to my previous job and started the "#100DaysOfCode challenge", I built, built, built a ton of projects on Github (almost 50 in 2021), and I started to post on Hashnode every week, participate to hackathons and read what the community has to give! And it was a new breath in my developer life!

Back to school and a new passion

When I say back to school, I mean back to tutorials, reading docs, and achieving hackathons.

In 2021, I dig into the crypto world cause I missed that in 2017 but not this time, and here again, I found an amazing french community and a lot of topics to learn about crypto. I love watching popularization videos on youtube about different blockchains and how they work, I think there are big brains creating the blockchain system based on mathematics research (even if it's mainly used to create NFT scams). I wish one day I'll be able to work on a blockchain project because it seems very different and unique compared to a "classic" IT job.

Conclusion

To conclude, I think a developer is a curious and creative person that can keep learning new things to stay updated with the new system that evolves very fast each year. And that's why I get up in the morning so I guess I'm a developer :) and you?