My Unconventional Coding Story | Self-Taught

what's up everybody it's Travis here from Travis dot media today is going to be a little different I have no notes I have no outline today I want to share my unconventional self-taught coding story now I know what you might be thinking what does this guy think he's a celebrity or something like we care about his life no I don't I've been all over the world I've never once had somebody be like hey you're that guy from YouTube Travis media never once only one time in Hong Kong this lady was like are you Chris Martin from Coldplay and I was like what Chris Martin I'm Travis media and she was like who and I was like but when I was learning the code one thing that really really helped me was listening to other people who made it other people who did that and were way ahead of me so I was learning to code I was facing a lot of struggles juggling time juggling my job and my family and the struggles of learning to code and then eventually trying to get the job finding work facing imposter syndrome all of those things and I would listen to other people's stories and would learn from them and would get encouragement from their lows and their highs and their tips and tricks so I feel like many of you are in the same boat you're learning to code or you're somewhere along that journey and you just need some encouragement and so that's why I'm making it today I want to share my journey to help you on yours so as always grab some coffee I don't have my tea I think it's in the other room grab some coffee grab some tea make some time kick back and find some encouragement so prior to learning to code I had no coding encounters I always thought it was for those really smart people that had degrees and you had to be really good at math I could never do something like that so I never even attempted it nobody ever told me it was something I I could do we didn't learn it in school and it just never crossed my mind so it's a teenager I worked as a park ranger a scooped ice cream and I stocked shelves at Target about 19 I moved out I got my own apartment and I started working at a restaurant in fact I worked at the same restaurant chain in two different locations so I worked in the morning at one restaurant in the kitchen in the evening in another restaurant same chain in the kitchen and in between that I worked at a radio station that's what I really wanted to do at the time but unless you're a personality you're not going to make money in radio right I was at an AM station I was the afternoon producer I got to do a couple of shows I got to do the weather and the sports and all that cool stuff but I was making like minimum wage and there was no room for advancement radio is a tough job so I worked at that for a while I had three jobs I got kind of worn out I had saved a bunch of money and I decided hey I'm gonna go traveling so I went traveling internationally I eventually got married to a wonderful lady and I ended up back in the city without a job so I went to a temp agency to take the first job I could get and they put me at LabCorp now if you know anything about LabCorp people take drug tests in the samples are put in a box along with the paperwork and sent to us and I'm sitting there eight hours a day flipping through these Pages punching in data so I'm a data entry guy I'm working like five in the morning to 1 30 and I'm just flipping through papers and in fact we didn't even have a full keyboard we just had the number pad so I'm punching in data flip the page I punch in some data I flip the page all day long I did that for about six months and we found out we were expecting so we moved back up to Virginia and again I took the first job I could get there which was answering phones at a hospital in a health information department and the job kind of sucked but I was like look I'm gonna stay here six months I'm gonna figure out what else to do and I'm gonna get out there I'm gonna get a better job but I'm gonna do this for a little while to get on my feet well that's six months turned into 10 years and many of you guys may be in that same situation don't let it happen six months was all I intended I went from 24 to 34 in that dead-end job I didn't have any ambition I didn't have any skill to fall back on I didn't have anybody to encourage me and say Hey you have these other skills or hey you should go this direction or get this kind of training and do this I just had the job I was brought up in a kind of non-entrepreneurial family they told me to get a job stick with it retire happy and that's what I thought I should do so I ended up staying there 10 years I started out answering phones eventually they were like man this guy could type so they started let me do medical transcription they gave me some easy reports and then I learned the terminology and I started typing all the time as a medical transcriptionist and it was kind of neat it was like the more you type you can get to this level where you make extra money so I was making extra money but it still wasn't a lot I had a salary I had benefits that was great but I still wasn't making a lot of money and eventually just to give me a little extra pay which wasn't much they changed my job title to analyst and they let me do some speech recognition stuff which wasn't much but I was basically still typing I just got like another thousand or two thousand a year and I was just kind of stuck there but while I was there I had this idea that I had things in my head that everybody wanted to know so I started a Blog and I started blogging regularly and I had this WordPress theme that I wanted to customize and I was like I want to change this color I want the menu to do this I want to change this font I didn't know how to do it so I had to write the theme company and they would write me back with some CSS or they'd write me back with some HTML or some JavaScript or something to paste in to their theme and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world still I didn't think it was something I could do but I thought it was neat so I started learning little Snippets CSS Snippets HTML Snippets thought it was so great and around that time frame I got called into my boss's boss's office and he was like hey Travis just to let you and your boss know we're Outsourcing your department in three months don't say nothing which is kind of messed up but we're keeping you and we're keeping your boss so no worries and I'm thinking sure no worries after you lay everybody else off what what happens to us we work another three months and then we're laid off I mean transcription work can easily be outsourced why would they keep me around much longer so it got me thinking and it was really the first time in my life I've been pushed up against the wall like that I really didn't have any skill set I had really nothing I could do I had no past jobs to fall back on I had no degree I had no path to move forward I wanted to do something different I wanted to have a better job but what do I do I have no skill set when am I going to go back to the restaurant I'm going to go back to data entry at LabCorp I don't have money to go back to college by this time I was like 33 34 years old so I started thinking what do I like to do what is something new and fresh that I can put my full effort toward and make this a point in my life that I'm actually going to shift completely and succeed at something else I'm actually going to make some more money and be happy in my job and I started thinking you know what I love writing that code that HTML and CSS that I'm sent or that CSS that I've learned I love doing that I wonder if I can learn to code and switch careers and at the moment and I was like no way you can't do that without a degree you can't do that without math and all this other stuff but I started Googling around I started checking YouTube and there were people doing it so I decided I'm gonna go all in on this thing if they can do it I can do it and by that time I had three kids and I wasn't making a lot of money my wife was like Travis you gotta do better you got to bring home some more money and I just had lots of motivation my family needs me I need more purpose in my job I need more money I'm gonna do this thing so I decided I couldn't do it on my own I couldn't just go and learn the stuff I need to do something drastic so I joined a boot camp boot camp was super expensive it was like 15 grand but I was like I don't care whatever it takes if I can pay 15 grand change into the programming career as a like software developer that's way worth it I'll make the money back I'll pay that off and so I did that so I was still at this company and I decided I'm gonna do this boot camp it was called block at the time I think it's been bought out by another company I don't know the name of it I don't know if they're still doing boot camp things but block was like one of the leading boot camps eight years or so ago and I joined them and they had the whole package the front end the back end they had the mentors and all of the good stuff the projects the portfolios they had everything you wanted so I would work from like eight to five full day and then by like five o'clock in 30 minutes I was on my computer coding I took every opportunity to code that I could I coded right after work for like an hour hour and a half then I would go to dinner I'd play with the kids I'd talk with a wife and then about 10 o'clock I'd get back on the computer for two or three hours I'd wake up I'd do the same thing the next day and I would try to code like 20 hours a week and I had my family on the same page I told my wife look this is the big step up for us I'm gonna do this I just need some support I need some time to get it done she was on board the kids were on board actually they were pretty small so they didn't know but I made time for coding very intentional time for coding I cut out all the weekend fun and I told everybody look for about six months I'm gonna be doing this thing I'm gonna be busy and it's going to change my life and I got really focused on this Mission so I joined them I learned HTML thought it was the best thing in the world learned CSS fell in love with programming and then I got the JavaScript JavaScript was tricky I really struggled with it at first because I had no coding background I really didn't know what I was doing and we were building this app like this music player app and the teacher was just writing all all this code really fast and and I was you know struggling to keep up with it and they were writing all these functions and we were calling it from other files and I just you know it was hard and right when I started getting it they were like let's take this whole app and refactor it with jQuery so I had to learn jQuery and I wrestled with that for a while but I eventually got it and I still loved it I still loved coding and seeing things being built on the web page now around this time I jumped on upwork I wanted to make some extra money on the side I jumped on upwork I created a profile and I started taking these really menial jobs like people were like hey can you install this theme for me like WordPress theme and I was like yeah I can do that for five bucks and then somebody else would be like I need the color of my menu changed and I was like yeah I'll do that for like 10 bucks I did that and I started getting work on there and I realized you know what I can kind of make money with just the front end of this programming so I finished the front end track I finished all of that and I got ready to start the back end of the boot camp now the back end of the boot camp was in Ruby on Rails you learn Ruby then you learned the Ruby on Rails framework and I started looking in my area for jobs that used Ruby on Rails because at that time you didn't have all the remote jobs you have now everything was kind of In-House so I started looking at the hospitals and schools and warehouses factories things like that in my area nobody was using Ruby on Rails so I started thinking why am I going to learn Ruby on Rails if nobody's using it and I'm already making money on upwork and my boot camp is expensive if I stop like if I drop out halfway into it I can get half my money back like if I stop now I get my 8 000 back and so I decided based on all of that I would just drop out of the boot camp so I dropped out I got my money back I immediately started learning WordPress in PHP development so I got a WordPress course on udemy and learned PHP I learned WordPress and started picking up upwork jobs for WordPress development now in your journey you're going to have these moments where Things fall into place you don't know when they're gonna happen but they will happen for me I was on upwork and I saw this one job ad from this web agency in Colorado they were looking for a part-time WordPress developer to come on board and help like full stack WordPress developer so I wrote them I told them all of these things like I'm this WordPress developer and I did this boot camp and and here's some things on GitHub that I've done I'd love to have this job and they wrote me back and they said hey I think you'd be a good fit do you want to join us as a full stack WordPress developer working part-time it can be up to 30 hours a week and I was like absolutely so I took that and I worked that 30 hours a week while I work my full-time job now granted everybody over here and my job had been outsourced I was having to work double the effort because people were gone they were like let's just give it all to Travis and then over here I was having all this fun as a real developer working for this agency so there was a senior developer and then there was me and they would assign us work and Assan I think it was Asana or bitbucket no it was a bit bucket they were a sign in his work and we were working on all these WordPress sites it was so much fun and I was making you know enough money so I decided hey I'm I'm just going to leave this job it's uncertain I shouldn't have been here for 10 years I finally found some kind of Direction in my life career-wise I'm out of here so I quit that job and I started working for this company and I learned a lot and I was so new to it right I was learning while I was working like this one ticket I was supposed to take the gravity forms plug-in and add this hook to where it sent an email when somebody submits the thing and I remember thinking like I don't know even where to begin and I talked to the senior developer and he was like oh here's some documentation here's how you do it and I just sat there for like hours and hours like now even knowing where to start I eventually told him I can't do it he wrote it it was like 25 lines of code and for me it was like how did he even come up with that that's mind-blowing that he could even do that now I'll look back and I'm like that's easy like why couldn't I why couldn't I do that but I was learning as I was going so I was playing the Imposter I was taking the tasks that were super hard and I was getting most of them done that one I just mentioned I couldn't do it was only one or two of those but most of the things I did it and he would tell me hey this code you can refactor it this way and was very gracious toward me so I was really thankful for that job at the same time I was picking up more work on upwork I started building websites for people and those people would come back to me hey we need this fixed too and when they did I would say hey let's take it off of upwork because upwork charge is a 20 fee so I would get that client I'd do the work for them then when they came back I would take them off of upwork so I had the upwork work and then I had the work going on outside of upwork and I reached out to a local web agency in my area asked them if they had overflow work and they did so they started sending me work too so I had good steady work going on but I wasn't making still a lot of money I was making more than at the company but when you combine the lack of health insurance and all of those things and there's no vacation time things like that I was probably making the same but I was free over here I wasn't having to go into the office I was able to stay home I was able to do things that I like to do now I did this for two years I freelanced for two years and while doing that I started documenting my journey on the blog so if you go to travis. media and go to my oldest posts you'll see the very first one is when I started the boot camp and I just went through here the things I'm learning here's where I'm at and I documented my journey I've still been writing new things that I'm learning but I also started to do YouTube I started to explain topics that I was learning and they're really really bad quality like if you go back to my early videos it's like me in a closet like my kids were playing everybody was being loud so I'd go in the closet and I'd be like in this video I'm going to tell you what that e means in JavaScript hey everybody Travis here with another video and I want to talk real quick about what that little e is passed as a parameter in JavaScript functions it's really bad but I was consistent with that I was freelancing and I was creating content in the form of blogging and youtubing and I did that for two years but after a while with freelancing if you don't bring anybody on board to help you out you get caught up in all of this administrative stuff so I was coding like 30 30 of the time the rest of the time I'm on the phone I'm writing proposals or I'm budgeting or sending out some invoices and I kind of got tired of that I started thinking I just want to code I just want to sit down and code and not have to deal with all this administrative stuff and at that time I realized that a lot of people were working from home and maybe it's time for me to get back into the corporate space as a software engineer I can make more money I could still work from home I could have benefits and so I decided to do that I looked on LinkedIn I started applying for jobs I started sending out my resume had some coding interviews some went well some didn't completely bombed some coding exams but this one company reached out and asked if I could speak to their senior developer he could go over kind of what their technology is and talk to me and find out kind of where I'm at so I met with the senior developer of this company and he basically showed me their app here's their app and here's all the templates this is what we're building this is how we do things and I kind of just yeah oh that's great oh yeah I like that I asked questions and we kind of hit it off and then he said here's our Ruby on Rails app it's a data app and we pull all of this data and we send it all back to Wordpress and populate the page and it was golf. com by the way so it's this monstrous site run on WordPress so there are all these templates they really did a good job of putting it together but I talked with him and I really didn't have to do anything I had to listen to him kind of discuss a couple of things ask a couple of questions afterwards when we were finished he was like well I'll relay all this back to my boss and we'll get back to you so I thought nothing of it a couple of days later the boss called me and said hey Travis we want to make you an offer and I was like really we want to offer you a job job with the company as a full stack software developer and then he asked me how much are you expecting to be paid like what's your range and I've been preparing for this I didn't want to ask for too much and scare them away but I didn't want to ask for too little I'm already making this much I want to make more than that so I thought a good conservative answer was like 60 though so I was like 60 000 maybe 65 000 and he was like okay well I'll get back to you I'll talk to the team and get back with you and I was like oh I remember telling my wife like oh I asked too high they're not going to call me back well they did call me back the next day and the guy said this he said Travis the senior developer liked you we like your blog content and YouTube content we see that you're competent that you like to teach that you know the material and by the way that helped me a lot in this scenario having a Blog having YouTube that demonstrated that I knew the material I was able to write about the material I was able to do the coding on my YouTube videos and they liked that so if you're thinking about blogging your journey or youtubing your journey do it can't hurt you and it probably will help you but anyway he said so we talked about it we want you to stick around we want to take you on as a developer and we want you to stay around and grow with us so we're not going to offer you 60 we're going to offer you 90.

and I was almost passed out in the driveway I was like what and he said yeah 90 because we don't want you to come and then find another job and leave us we want you to stick around so we're going to offer you 90 000. how was that and I was like you know where do I sign and so I took this job stopped my freelancing and this job introduced me to a lot right we had some very professional developers I mean it was golf. com it's a massive site we had developers that built out all of these templates and so I learned so much by how they did that we had a Ruby on Rails app that pulled data from these apis and sent it all to Wordpress so that was neat but what I really learned was the scrum methodology or agile methodology so we had daily stand-ups that was new to me we had a scrum Master we had stakeholders we had tasks that we were assigned during our Sprint we also had a devops team so we had openshift we were running all these containers we had CI CD and gitlab these were all new things so as a freelancer I'm just focused on WordPress web development in my own little bubble I get out here and there's all this new technology technology don't really get to mess with as a freelancer a lot of times but here I am all of this new technology I'm surrounded by these great programmers there's devops there's scrum and I'm learning so much well three to four months into this and this company does a lot of government work I was the only person doing the non-cleared work about three to four months into this I left this job now the guy that hired me ended up leaving the company and the two other people like ran out of work for me they kept saying Yeah Monday we're gonna have some new work for you you're gonna be on a new team you're gonna be doing this kind of thing well Monday would come and there's still be no work so the golf.

com thing ended I didn't have anything else to do so I ended up taking vacation time I used all of my vacation time there still wasn't a job for me yet so I was thinking this sucks so I was uncertain where I was going there but all of a sudden I get this message on LinkedIn from a company a software company in my area this is another one of those moments you don't expect but you're kind of in the right place at the right time this guy writes me he's like hey I'm with this company in your city I'm looking to hire 30 people I got this new contract I need 30 people quick we're a company that likes good people that can learn the material we don't want the super smart people that are hard to work with we see that you know this technology that you work at this place and we know that you can learn the stuff do you want the job so the guy called me we talked he's a great guy great company great philosophy the position though was a site reliability engineer position which was brand new to me and I liked the challenge and I like the devops from my previous job the devops that I was exposed to so I decided hey this job didn't give me any work this job is very promising it's local and it's a chance for a raise because obviously you don't take a new job without getting a higher salary so I left this job I started working as a site reliability engineer now a lot of us in the contract were new some of the people were like super smart senior level and then a couple of us were just like people they needed quickly so I worked with one guy he was a electrical engineer that just coded on the side he took the job too so me and him kind of hit it off we both have non-traditional backgrounds in the first week four of us okay one guy was really smart the three of us weren't four of us were tasked with deploying the elk stack on a Linux server so that was new okay I have a Mac I use the Unix terminal so the Linux terminal wasn't too bad but the Linux system was brand new second we were in the cloud we were in Azure so I had to go in Azure and be like what is a VM and third the elk stack like I thought elk was an animal but elk is elasticsearch log stash and Cabana so I had to learn that I had to learn Linux I had to get in the cloud I had to learn about SSH public private Keys all of that stuff right away within my first week and within a few weeks I started feeling good about that I started feeling good in Linux and the cloud and I got on a contract where we're deploying containers to kubernetes that took me months and months to figure out I actually worked for a couple of months building Helm charge kind of copying other people's charts still didn't know really what was going on I tried to look at the documentation but a lot of times in those scenarios you have to back up and go back to the foundations like I needed to actually go back and be like what is a container learn about containers first but I couldn't because I was just stuck trying to move forward too fast so I was building Helm charts I was kind of looking at other people's copying what they're doing deploying having it fail and eventually I called on and within a year of that gig I felt pretty good with kubernetes I felt really good with containers the next year I got put on a new gig with a bunch of really really talented humble senior developers and we were in AWS we were the infrastructure team on that project and we used active directory for error authentication so that was new to me and AWS was brand new to me we were spinning up ec2 instances using infrastructure as code we were managing things with SSM it was really the best learning experience for me I kind of just sat back of course I did my work but I kind of just sat back the whole time and just watched senior developers at work I did my work I got things done but the things I learned on that contract I just can't describe working around really good developers is one of the best things you can do especially if they're humble and they help you learn and they answer your questions when needed so I worked in AWS for about a year I got AWS certified I learned a lot more about devops after that was over I got put on a new gig and in this one I was building an API in. net and this wasn't just some hobby API like I've done hobby apis I've built little small apis at home this one was actually going to be scaled to hundreds of thousands of users so it was massive it had lots of security protocols and it was another experience where I can say I was a complete imposter but I came out of it with a lot more knowledge another thing I did on that contract is I had to write a lot of SQL scripts we used SQL Server which again was new to me SQL wasn't but anything beyond the sequel Basics was so I had to learn a lot about SQL and cursors and functions and all of that cool stuff transactions and I did that for about six months but at that time I started thinking what do I really want my career to go okay I've been doing this now for seven years or so where do I want my career to go now well I liked coding but I didn't like just sitting there all day just punching out code I'm getting too old for that I could try to become a senior job developer or get more into consulting or something like that but I thought I really love creating content I really love creating blog posts and YouTube videos and teaching people new things so I started looking into it and came across the developer relations engineer job and I thought hey that's perfect I can create content I can engage with the community and I can still write code so I apply it at different places I bombed some interviews because I really didn't have any experience there but this one place took a chance on me I did an interview and for this coding exam I had to create an API just a basic API that had a serious security flaw in it and to create that flaw and then I had to containerize it and then I had to write a blog post on the problem it has and then how it would be fixed like what code should I change what should I do to fix this security flaw so I did that I wrote it I thought it was really good I sent it in and they liked it and they said hey we like the way you wrote we thought you explained it well and we want to offer you the job so that's where I'm currently at I'm currently a developer relations engineer and I love it I'm able to create content I'm able to engage with the community I'm able to go to conferences and travel and I'm also still able to code and write scripts and all of that fun stuff and I'm at a place in my career where I can do that where I can sit back and say what do I want to do next devrel is where I wanted to go next and in this economy I could be laid off anytime they could let me go and I have to find something else that's the nature of things now but look if you've made it this far thanks for sticking with me I hope you found some encouragement I hope you found some nugget of some sort to get you out of the next slump you might be in and next week I'm going to release another video kind of related to this about the top eight things that I've learned in my eight years as a software engineer so I started learning to code at 34 and this year I'll be 42.