Is this a question you get asked often? I mean, why did you want to become a software engineer?
Well for me the answer was not that simple. You see, I was a late 40 something O.G, (that’s old guy for those of you that do not know) that had a reasonably successful business. By reasonably successful that means I worked some crazy hours and made a better than decent living. That is until one day I felt a bit of a pull at the base of my spine which gradually got worse and worse until getting up in the morning was an achievement in itself.
You see, all those years of doing what I did in my business, for the hours I did them for took a toll on my back and once that toll manifested itself into real pain then the damage was way past being done.
So I reluctantly sold my business and went into early retirement. Sweet, I hear you say, well, not so sweet once boredom sets in and even less so when you find out that your self-funded retirement is not going to last as long as you thought it would.
So it was time to consider, what to do next, I can’t do anything that involves any sort of physical exertion so I had to think about what I was good at.
Well during my retirement I had started dabbling around with amateur broadcasting, sim racing to be exact. I had purchased a program that allowed me to use prebuilt overlays and customize them to my liking using css style values. In the beginning it was all simple, mainly cut and paste, however soon I wasn’t happy with the options available to me, so I started to read the lines of code and slowly work out how to make them do what I wanted them to do.
The idea of taking a piece of code and being able to create something from it really appealed to my sense of order and structure so I thought what would happen if I peeled back some more layers and went deeper into this stuff?
So I did some research and “voila”, software engineering, something that I could really sink my teeth into and see if I could take what I already knew, (as far as life lessons were concerned), combine them with a new skill and turn into a career that could possibly see me working well past what most people would call their retirement age.
So that’s why I’m here, surrounded by all these young pups eager for them to teach me something new and exciting.
Peace, JP
