Eric Price, September 15, 2015 | 1 min read

Just the Beginning

Two months ago I quit my IT job and went all in on switching career paths to application development. I have been working in IT for about 9 years and I had reached the point where I knew it was no longer for me. Instead of only installing and managing applications, I wanted to create them. I had to make a change and I knew exactly what path I wanted, but how I was going to get there was the big question.

I started coding on my own for a while where I made website after website, learning HTML, CSS and responsive design, eventually moving onto Python by taking courses on TeamTreeHouse and CodeAcademy. Doing this while working full-time was difficult, since I couldn’t fit as much time on coding as I wanted to. But when I discovered earlier this year, that a couple of web developer bootcamps had come to my area, I knew this was my chance; my chance to get a development role and begin what I love doing all day long and get paid while doing it!

 For a few months my wife and I made plans that would allow us to make a huge change like this. We put our house on the market, sold a bunch of stuff and moved into a small apartment, so we could afford to live off of one income for a little while. My wife knew how much I enjoyed coding and sacrificed a lot to allow me to do this. When the time came, I quit my IT job and dove head first into learning everything I could on web development. Over the course of these 8 weeks, I have learned a lot and spent hours each day after class applying that knowledge to my personal projects. As a result of that, I create two large projects that I’m extremely proud to show off, as well as a third one in progress. Right now I’m getting myself out there, posting my resume to numerous sites, looking for that junior developer role and in the mean time I’ll continue building my skill set and working on my next project.