Here’s How I Became a Backend Engineer.
397 straight days of coding every night changed the entire direction of my life.
I’ve been building something new for backend engineers.
It’s not just another course.
It’s designed to solve the “I don’t know what I don’t know” problem - and it also teaches how backend engineers actually work with AI. It has videos and interactions.
It’s currently, check it out here: https://cwroby.com/Z7qLm2Xv9Ra
Let me bring you back to 2016.
I graduated with a computer science degree, but I was a very bad coder.
I wanted to break into software development, but I struggled to find an internship. I hardly knew anything about Java. That was the programming language I was most familiar with, which was not a good sign.
So I started coming to terms with the fact that my coding ability just wasn’t there. I needed an internship. I started looking at different possibilities. What are the areas within tech for a computer science degree that aren’t software development?
There are many options in tech.
And there are a whole bunch of different areas. There’s cybersecurity. There’s project management. There’s technical analysis. In software development, you’ll find data engineering, data science, machine learning, and AI.
But none of them felt like a good match for me because I wasn’t technical enough.
My First Real Job - Business Analyst
I landed an internship that became my first full-time job as a business analyst.
A business analyst is the liaison between technical people, such as software developers, and the business that needs to get things done.
I would spend my days talking with the actual business users. I’d ask them what they needed or what features they wanted. I’d write a requirements document for the dev team. This would outline what we needed and what was most important for their next sprint.
This was a little different from typical contracting work. We were building internal software for our own company. The business users were in the same building as the developers. They sat just a room away. My job was to connect the two. I communicated needs and checked that what we requested was built and functional.
I was good at it.
But I always had this deep feeling that I wanted to be a software developer.
The Desire to Build
I wanted to create products. I wanted to build things that could reach millions of people and watch that grow. I just always had this deep desire to create software.
That desire had been with me for a long time. I was completely fascinated when smartphones and Android devices first showed up in high school. Apps were mind-blowing to me. I remember thinking, “This is revolutionary. This is what I want to do.”
But unfortunately, I didn’t know how to code well enough after college. So I became a business analyst instead.
My Competitive Advantage
Here’s the thing, though. My competitive advantage was that I was surrounded by the people doing the work every single day.
I was surrounded by project managers. I was surrounded by DBAs (Database Administrators). I was surrounded by software developers. I was around everyone who created products and enhanced applications. I delivered the work from the business side.
As a result, I gained a deep understanding of what it takes to build software. Not from a textbook. Not from a course. Just from being around the people who do it.
The Person Who Changed Everything
I’m so blessed that one of the senior developers on the team took me under his wing. I told him I wanted to be a software developer, and he helped me become one.
I still owe everything to him. He completely changed the direction of my life and career.
397 days straight
From that point on, I spent every single night coding. 397 days straight. Every single night until I got my first software engineering paycheck.
And the rest is history.
Cheers friends,
Eric Roby
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