This is my first ever blog post, any constructive criticism I will gladly take it.

TL;DR Went from a college dropout to trying my luck to get into Medical School, to failure, to re-grouping and landing a job as a developer.

Hi there, my name is Raul Rusu, I am 26 years old guy from Romania

And here is my journey to become a developer.

Childhood

I have always been into computers for as long as I can remember, but instead of coding, I was more interested in gaming than anything else.

First time coding

It was a High School presentation project about the Internet, and I chose to make the presentation as a website, instead of a PowerPoint.

I used Dreamweaver as my IDE and HTML, CSS, and some jQuery for the website. The website was made on the weekend before the presentation. I wish I would still have the project, just to take me back.

Unfortunately, I didn't go through with learning more about Web Development, as I got distracted with High School things ( I know this is not an excuse ).

College

In 2014 I want to college here in Romania, at the TUCN (Technical University of Cluj-Napoca) at the Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Information Technology, where I dropped out after 6 months.

You might ask why? I was truly excited to learn programming and all things programming in college, but it failed massively, actually made me hate programming, math, and physics which were the things that I used to love. Thinking back might be my fault too, the curriculum and many other things, so even though I blamed the faculty, might as well blame myself for not trying enough.

Break and Medical School

After I dropped out of college, I went into a 'hiatus' of partying, gaming, and more - this took about a year and some change until I got to my senses and started thinking of what I always enjoyed.

Here comes Medical School, as I always liked biology, I thought about becoming a Doctor - but as many of us think that to become a Doctor, you need to have a certain path and if you don't follow that path from the beginning you might as well forget about it - at least this is the thinking here.

Besides biology, what got me hooked on Medicine, is a job that my dad took, in which I helped, at a Hospital, to do a live stream from the operating room to the conference room and being live-streamed to other hospitals in Europe.

This event took 2 days, in which I was glued to the chair for the whole conference and at that moment I said to myself I want to become a surgeon.

After that, I went online, searched what I need to learn and bought a bunch of books, started learning, enjoyed everything, other than chemistry, which bit me, as I failed two years in a row the exam because I was (still) so bad at chemistry.

Long story short - this experience, made me who I am today and I regret nothing, sometimes I keep thinking that maybe later in life I will give it a try again, who knows.

Programming

Plan B - this is what I called it if by any chance I fail again. I did, so I regrouped and started learning programming by myself. One thing for sure, when learning to program by yourself without guidance, is that there are a lot, and I mean A LOT of tutorials good and bad and you have to skim through them and find the ones that actually give you the proper knowledge.

Because of that, you can get distracted very easily, I know I got.

After 5 months of learning, by a huge amount of luck, I got a job at the beginning of 2020, when everything started to go sideways in the world.

Blogging

I never blogged, never written something publicly, so this is actually my first post, so any criticism is good.

Writing this, made me realize that blogging, or writing something that gives people some essence of what you're trying to say, is actually really hard (took me a week and some change to write this post)

• I know this post might be all over the place, but I am eager to learn and get better
• Thank you so much for taking your time to read what I've written here.

Have an awesome day, you are awesome.