"A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step."

• Lao Tzu

I have always had many interests: science, technology, machinery, philosophy, story telling and music. But the one I thought I'd try to turn into a career was mechanics and my love of cars.

After a brief stint in college I made my way into the automotive industry. It started with just washing cars at a car dealership, then, moved to maintaining vehicles and gradually I made my way to getting my Red Seal certification as a Truck and Transport Technician. The journey wasn't without its struggles though. At one point I was laid off, being the lowest in seniority, and I was even overlooked for further job opportunities. I persisted none the less and through determination and resourcefulness I inevitably succeeded.

In the final two years of my apprenticeship, a dear friend of mine made the leap into the tech industry and pushed me to look into coding or technical writing. I've always been of a curious nature, so the idea of understanding how the technological world around me worked was quite fascinating. With a simple google search and a multi-day deep dive down the rabbit hole, I landed on FreeCodeCamp and CS50x.

I started working through FreeCodeCamp's material fairly quickly. I was hard to not lose sight of my immediate goal, getting my Red Seal as a mechanic. As I was going into my fourth and final year of school, I had to focus and put this new found passion of mine on the back burner for a little while.

I attribute my intrigue for technology and the world around me to my grandfather. We would always talk about what he watched on the discovery channel or what amazing new technology was around the corner. He frequently mentioned that he saw this big tech convention on the television every year and that he would love to go one day. After a quick google search, I found out that he was talking about the Consumer Electronic Show, held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. This was the fuel I needed to feed the fire that was my new love of coding. Now that I had finished my apprenticeship and gotten certified, my new goal was to shift gears into tech and find a way to get he and I into the Consumer Electronic Show.

On the second go at coding, I decided to start with CS50x. The lectures and course work are truly something else. From the struggles of trying to find a semicolon I missed, to the challenge of trying to figure out why my program was leaking a single byte of memory, somedays, I would spend hours with my head down in my laptop until I would finish and those hours would feel as if I had just blinked. I was hooked.

Its around the half way point where I started to dedicate even more of my free time to learning computer science and started consuming content like blogs, podcasts, videos on various computer science topics and following people in tech on Twitter. It is also around this time that I sadly lost my grandfather and took a hiatus from my learning. This, on top of the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping the world, made the passion that once burned become like a candle flame in the wind: flickering, but not yet out. With everything going on, it took some time for me to figure out what I wanted from my life. I decided to take a leap once more back into the world of tech.

At the time of writing this, I am also working on my final project for CS50x. Which, I decided would be a full portfolio site with a blog attached where I could catalogue my learning path and keep me accountable by "Learning in public." As I gradually started to architect my portfolio site, I came across Hashnode and Sam Sycamore on Twitter. This is where I learned about Hashnode's technical writing boot camp and the ability to use Hashnode as a subdomain for my portfolio. My friend had always emphasized the benefits of technical writing so both were very appealing to me.

Though my path wandered and my goal changed, my passion for learning about the ever expanding world around me remains, and, so do I on my path from pulling wrenches to writing and coding.

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