Since my first Gameboy I was drawn to the screen and to the endless possibilities that live inside.
I initially didn't plan to become a developer, I set out to become a pharmacist. I am always intrigued by how things work and like to understand why things happen. The human body was an obvious choice. I mean, I have a body. Why does it do the things it does? A great mystery to solve.
I resisted the calling once during my bachelor thesis, which made me write a small Python program geared towards bioinformatics, but that didn't stick. To get a job, I thought I needed my own web presence and learned basic HTML, CSS, and enough Javascript to toggle classes, etc. I will never forget the moment when an interactive tutorial made me add a predefined stylesheet to a simple HTML page. Suddenly, it all looked so pretty. This time I was not able to resist. Instead of stopping here, and using the website as an online portfolio for a pharmacist job, I took time off to learn this magic and got a job some months later, kickstarting my developer journey.
Learning how to make the site pretty and interactive with animations was always the easy part for me. Javascript was only a necessity to make these interactions in the beginning. Turns out that for the more difficult, app-like animations you needed more Javascript than some toggled CSS classes here and there (back in 2019). It was the time of the single-page apps and started with the Vue-JS framework since it looked like chunks of HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Javascript was the hardest to learn for me. I guess it was more about a connection I made early as a student that programming can only be done by computer science people. To become one of these computer science people, complex math was required. At my university, computer science and math had the same courses for the first two semesters and where infamous for failing people who just like computers. What a high barrier of entry.
After settling in with my first official developer job, I wanted to learn more about how stuff works. How do these Javascript frameworks achieve reactivity? How do they render? What makes something render fast? etc. I felt I found a whole new world of mysteries to solve. Additionally, the time to the next mystery in my coding job is sooooo much faster than it would have been as a pharmacist.