When reading about people that work in tech I’m often amazed on how straight forward their career path have been. Usually it goes a little bit like this: “I started programming when I was 12, then I went to university and got a degree in computer science, then I got a job at some company and now I’m a senior software engineer”. Voilá easy peasy, the road laid open and it was up there for the taking.

I wish I had have that kind of career path, but my mind works a little bit differently. In my late teens the last thing I wanted to do was to work with computers, I wanted to play music, skateboard and just do all the things that you do when you are young and have a brain constantly chasing dopamine. In a weird way tough, I was always drawn to computers and was the go to guy for fixing computers among friends, but beeing a developer, that sounded boring and absolutley something I would never perceive myself doing.

A few years later while zapping through the channels on TV i stumbled upon a documentary about the Magnum photographer Robert Capa. From that moment on I knew I was going to be a photographer. The only problem was that I didn’t have a camera and I didnt really know how to use one. For my birthday that year, both problems were solved, I got an Canon EOS 300 (yeah it was film back then), a couple of rolls of black and white and color positive film and a book about photography. From that point I shot everything, everyday and it didn’t take that long before I was starting to get some small assignments. Around the same time I started university and got a degree in litterature and theater (theory). I met some really cool people who was involved in free theather groups and started to shot their performances and events and I also started to review books and plays for different magazines. So I did the shooting and the writing, It became a job, it was odd hours, it was long days and it was a bit strange to work when everyone else got home from their 9-5 jobs. It didnt really feel like the thing I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. Around this time was the first time I started to think about working with computers as a profession, maybe it would be cool to build stuff and be creative in a different way? But I still had a pretty negative (boring) image of what a developer were but I applied for a computer science course at the university and got in.

The summer went, I was almost to old to go to school (or at least I told myself that), all my friends where establishing themself in their careers and I was still a photographer, but out of blue came an oppertunity to work as a photography teacher for a semester at a school for kids age 12-16. I thought about going to school for another four years or start earning money and have “a real” job and landed on the teaching job. Teaching kids was ok, but I found out that I the kids I worked best with where the ones that where in special class because they had a hard time with attention and impulse control. Those were the kids I could connect with and I found it rewarding and the highs and lows were often extreme and could change during the same day. The next semester I was offered a position as a full time teacher so I took it and later started to study for a teachers degree while I was working. I felt after a couple of years that teaching wasn’t really my thing (I had never really felt that It was…) and that I couldn’t keep doing it much longer. I thought about what I really liked about the job and the one thing that stood out was my 10% (or 15%, dont really remeber) of my time that I had for fixing the school computers.

The good thing about beeing really impulsive and beeing really bad at consecquences is that I make shit happen (all other parts are just bad…). I quit my teaching job and went back to school for a 2-year developer bootcamp. So whitout a real income and with two kids I was back in school and started to learn how to code. I was a bit older than the other students, I didn’t know the difference between backend or frontend, but choose to learn backend development, because my cousin is a backend developer so I went for the same path. I took me two, maybe three days to realize that I had hit jackpot with this decision. I found out that I really liked backend development, I liked the problem solving, the logic and the fact that I could be creative in a different way. It was really the perfect blend of what I had learned from 30 years of skateboarding and from photography. Skateboarding isn’t really about making tricks, it’s more about wanting to do something, failing, trying again, failing again, trying until it sticks. Pretty much like learning to code. Photography is about seeing the world in a different way, finding the right angle, the right light and the right moment. It have some similarities with designing a system or a feature, thinking about a problem, seeing it from different angles before acting on it. The fact that I had spent some years teching and studying on how to learn didn’t hurt either. Coding became a gift that kept on giving. I later found the whole open source community which had such resemblence to the skateboarding and punk DIY community and got even more hooked.

This is my fourth year as a develper and I don’t think I ever felt this passionate about a job before. In a way it’s weird because I work with my hobby. The downside of that, beeing that in periods I’m having a hard time doing other stuff (which always bite you in the end), but I guess that’s more of a me problem than a job problem.

Finally some similiraties and dissemblies between the different fields:

  • Douche comment in software development: “I use arch btw”

  • Douche comment in photography: “I use a Leica btw”

  • Douche comment in teaching: “I used to teach at university btw”

  • Reality in software development: “These requirements are really unclear!?”

  • Reality in photography: “These requirements are fucking impossible to meet without a proper budget!!”

  • Reality in teaching: “These requirements are impossible to meet regardless of budget!!”

  • Perk of beeing in software development: “I can work from home, I can work from anywhere in the world”

  • Perk of beeing in photography: “Nobody excpets anything from me, I’m a creative…”

  • Perk of beeing in teaching: “June, July and August…”

  • Downside of beeing in software development: “Hey, you work with computers, can you have a look at my printer?”

  • Downside of beeing in photography: “Hey, you’re a photographer, which camera should I buy?”

  • Downside of beeing in teaching: “Hey, you’re a teacher, let me tell you everything that’s wrong with the education system even tough I haven’t set foot in a school in twenty years?”