Career changes can be tough. There is a lot that is unknown and you go from feeling like an expert, an authority in you field, to feeling like you know nothing. Or that you are at least, starting from way behind.

This is my most recent experience. I went from a musician with a life on the road, touring, playing shows, working for hire by artists; to a career in the technology world. I have since realized that there is often more overlap in the two worlds than one might expect, though some of that may just be that music and tech are great hobbies.

Currently I am working for an app development company, handling their technical support. However, long term I would like to be a programmer, a developer, a code warrior if you will.

I am starting this journey from scratch, from zero. I am technically savvy I would say, however I have never really looked into, or dealt with any type of coding per se. I did have my own website, but these days, it can be very easy to make a website by dragging and dropping, and maybe copying and pasting a small code here and there.

I first started by googling “coding.” I bookmarked lots of sites, but came across CodeAcademy. They offered a couple different tutorials and I can’t remember if it was just the first one I saw, the name that I knew, or if it was a recommended course, but they had a beginning tutorial on HTML. I started going through the course and found I really enjoyed it. I liked the problem solving, I liked feeling like I could tell this machine what to do in a whole new, almost visceral, way. It was fun! I was fascinated by being able to load up a .html file that I made in a text editor on a browser and see the changes that I had just made. I completed the course, appetite growing, but knowing that at least for the moment, web development was not where I wanted to be.

I started looking at a language that would function as a catch all…a language that I could use as a launching point into any area that would like to move toward. I started learning Java as this catch all. I figured that it would give me a bit of flexibility in where I could go.

Shortly after, one of my good friends started working with as a recruiter. They deal specifically with C# and the .Net framework. As he is now one of my best connections in this industry, I decided to start working with C# and begin the process of learning that language and coming back to Java later.