My journey as a software developer

Dan Willoughby・ Dec 4, 2019・1 min read

I started my journey with iOS, watching videos from Stanford's free iOS course. I released my own iOS app and then started looking for a job. The company I wanted to work for only had an Android spot open, so I learned Android as much as I could in a month and was hired!

Roughly a year later, I entered a programming contest and I poured time into it. I did well in the programming contest and I moved over to work for the company that hosted the contest. I did a complete 180 switch to backend development working with distributed systems and storage mainly in Golang. I struggled for awhile, but I had lots of support, so eventually I caught on.

I stayed at that company for almost 2 years until I was offered a position to work in web development. I was unsure of my abilities, but I took the position anyway and worked liked crazy to improve my abilities to be competent enough to do my job.

Just barely over a year later, I was poached to work at a startup doing work on distributed storage. I was to be their first hire (apart from the founding team) and that leads us to where I am currently working today. My diverse background was exactly what they needed and some days I have written code in up to 7 different languages.