In fact, I started developing a lot sooner than I started earning a living at it. And it is likely that most of the “Get into IT after thirty” stories are the result of the good work of talent hunters and numerous attempts to find employment in the marketplace. Perhaps after reading this article you will feel the “inner developer” in you or, on the opposite, you will realise that this is not your story at all. I will tell you the story of my search.

Hi! My name is Eugene and I started making money developing software products at the age of 33.

Start: Siberia, school, BASIC

Some Indians count their commercial product development experience together with experience from past lives. So you might get the resume of a 25 year old candidate with 15 years of development experience.

My story is more about a hobby that evolved into a profession. I grew up in a small Siberian town, where the most popular profession was a drilling rig operator. I got a personal computer only in 11th grade, and Internet access was via modem on telephone line - slow and expensive.

In high school, I liked to stay after school in the computer lab to play Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun online with friends. The first programming language I saw was BASIC. It was fun to digging into the code of a snake game the older kids had written. I even represented the school at the city programming contest. However, the Olympiad story did not inspire me - the problems there are usually too “synthetic”.

A recording studio and my first website in PHP

In my first university (none of which, by the way, I never finished) I studied C/C++, and even managed for a while to teach evening classes and extracurricular groups programming in these languages and earn money on students who were too lazy to write their own term and laboratory work.

One day my classmates gifted me a domain name and a year of hosting, where I ran a website written in PHP. There, friends shared their creations with headlines like “Why are space cockroaches afraid of Russian boiling water?

My first production job was in a recording studio, where I created radio commercials and hosted live shows. Then I was in charge of sound in the concert hall for a long time. Then the production became again the editing studio of the radio station. At the radio station, I also managed to finalise the website on Wordpress and get the servers up for internet broadcasting, because I was passionate about it and wanted to be useful.

Moving to Samara: I want to earn money by programming.

I moved to Samara in 2015. It was easier to find interesting work there. I had time to work in the sales of industrial fittings and in the sales of CRM systems for business. At that time, I finally decided that I would be more useful in developing digital solutions for real-world problems.

Once again I took a free web-development course at CodeNameCRUD.ru (russian version of The Odin Project) and began to look for job offers in this field. I worked at a cryptocurrency startup for six months, and in the end, from the second run, Appbooster and I found each other useful, and I spent three and a half years surrounded by a great team achieving results in developing a high-loaded product.

Ruby Ruby on Rails JavaScript React Native Swift Objective-C Java PostgreSQL Redis Sidekiq Ansible Circle CI Redash Ubuntu Server AWS Git

Production mindset

Now a quick test question for anyone who wants to go headfirst into development: “Do you notice your production mindset?” For example, you take a big project and divide it into logical parts. You analyse each part and think about how to replace the complex with the simple. If you have this quality, its development will sooner or later increase your value in the market. Especially in the IT field.

To find out your strengths and weaknesses and understand how you will be useful to the market, you can use the MBTI test. After taking the test, I realized that I am by nature a “crazy inventor”, like Dr. Emmett Brown from Back to the Future. And for me to be of maximum value, I need a large degree of freedom in what I do and a small team to discuss and frame crazy ideas into options for the future. Without a norm of “man-hours” or lines of code per month imposed from above.

And the main question is: “How do I start from scratch!?”

• To put together a good CV, you will need completed projects completed from scratch. Descriptive text in essay format is unlikely to interest anyone. To do this, set up a github profile - for a developer this is the resume;
• Study what programming languages are used to create what you are interested in;
• Take at least one course in this language (there are plenty of free ones), and keep your brain in gear - constantly educate yourself (I purposely do not use the word “learn”);
• Find an open-source project in this language and try to improve it.

You will not be noticed only if you stop trying. Good luck!