How I went from professional chef to a self-taught full-stack developer in one year.
My journey from a professional chef in Michelin star restaurants to a full-stack developer in one year.
I am a self-taught full-stack developer who has been working in the industry for two years.
Although having a passion for food and cooking, I have always had an interest in programming and the way technology functions at a basic level. I have never had any formal training in either cooking or technology, but I have always had a love for learning and natural curiosity.
This post will discuss how I went from being a professional chef to a full-stack developer while working a full-time job.
I have never been to any university nor have I done a programming Bootcamp.
It all started when I finally decided the life of being a professional chef wasn’t for me.
Why did I decide this?
I guess this came from many factors, but the main one being that I wanted to have a better lifestyle and while it is true that you can work in a hotel or in a lower level restaurant to achieve this goal, my pride wouldn’t allow me to take this route after so many years working in high-level cuisine.
Thus I began to think about how I could do this while still keeping the money flowing as it is quite impossible to have time to study while working twelve to sixteen hours a day.
Luckily, living in Madrid, Spain at the time and being a native English speaker there is a lot of demand for English teachers for the general public and so with the first piece of the puzzle solved I sought a job within an English Academy.
Then the covid-pandemic hit the world.
During the three months that we were trapped at home, I decided to use the lack of commute time to my benefit, all of a sudden the two hours I had to be going to and from work turned to zero. I still had to work for eight hours a day but I wasn’t complaining as now I could finish work and immediately work on improving myself.
It was at the same time that my girlfriend stumbled onto a free online course offered by Harvard University called CS50 Introduction to Computer Science.
I was amazed! Could this be the answer I was looking for?
And so with a borderline obsessive dedication, I started the course and I loved every minute of it as it took me through learning the basic concepts like arrays, data types, memory management in C.
Then, in the fifth week of the course, they introduced Python and I quickly discovered that the language in which I was learning wasn’t as important as the concepts I learnt.
I continued along this path until it came to the final project in which I chose to create a web application in Flask. But I was unhappy with my current level of knowledge and ability to create the application well.
Once more I found my pride and dedication to always do things to the best of my ability or not at all holding me back.
Instead of finishing the course, I sought out more information in Flask and this is when I found The Flask Mega-Tutorial by Miguel Grinberg.
This tutorial was amazing and through the twenty-three parts it explained everything I felt I needed basic and advanced techniques, it even went through how to host an application on linux, docker and heroku.
By the time I finished working with this tutorial I truly felt that I was ready to start the application I needed to finish the course. Unfortunately for me, at this time the academy had asked us to return to the office to teach in person but I didn’t let this deter me.
I would program in every spare minute I had, I was borderline obsessed.
In making the application for the course, which took me a good three months, I learnt something I hadn’t realized previously. You learnt a lot more in creating an application from scratch than you could in any course.
This is because rather than following along with somebody else’s instructions or only creating what the project required, you have complete free reign and usually will end up continuously adding features and running into problems that you have to figure out on your own.
Granted you can always go on StackOverflow, but that’s true in the real world as well. In the end, you have to learn not only how to ask the correct questions, but also how to research the correct answers.
With this newfound knowledge and confidence in my abilities with Flask, I decided to move forth and learn how to use Flask with React, which involved substantially different practices to a standard Flask application.
In doing this I learnt not only how to create an API but also how to interact with an API externally and how to keep things modularized within an application.
By this point, I had already been programming for 10 months.
I had developed an obsession and I was continuously creating personal projects, but I also felt that it was time for me to start applying for jobs as the combination of ten hours of work and eight hours studying was starting to get to me.
I wanted to be programming full-time.
I probably sent over two hundred applications and only had two responses, luckily one of the two responses was impressed with how I had done the change by that point and decided to give me a technical trial.
In this technical trial, they asked me to do something I had never done before and wasn’t even remotely within my ability set.
Choose one of three websites and build a web scraper to collect data in an automated fashion.
They had given me a week from the Friday of the interview.
I spend that entire Friday night researching how to build a web scraper and how to avoid getting blocked. Then I spent the entire weekend building not only one web scraper but all three.
I then decided to go one step further and connect all three to a Flask REST API and host it so that they could access it and run the scrapers and receive the data scraped from the API directly, rather than just receiving the file from me along with the code.
I got my first job in the industry!
I had finally done it! After eleven months of working extremely hard, I had received my first job in the industry as a junior developer.
I took the opportunity without even a glance at the money offered and decided to continue pushing forward. I worked there for six months learning as much as I would and continuing the habit of programming in my time off.
I learned a lot during my six months on the job and quickly became confident in creating web scrapers and handling data.
It was then that opportunity came knocking at the door once more.
After six months in that company, I received an email asking whether I would be interested in a company that was doing similar work to what I was doing but on a much larger scale.
I decided that I had to hear what they had to say. During the interview process, it became clear to me that this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
The team I would be working with had so much experience I could learn from and the company was working on projects that kept me excited, thus when I received the offer I had to say yes!
Where am I now?
Today I am still with said company, working hard on many interesting projects and continuously learning and improving on my current skills to propel me continuously forward in this new exciting industry.
I have also turned some of my attention to combining vastly different passions in the form of writing with the hope that I may pass my knowledge and experience in the different fields onto others as well as improve my communication skills.
So what is the secret to changing your career fast and successfully?
The truth is there is no secret.
The important thing is to remember you do not need a university degree or spend a lot of money to change your career. There are many resources out there for you, all it takes is hard work and determination along with the understanding that no matter how desperate or exasperating it may get, in the end, it is true what they say.
