Published 2024-10-02 by Daniel Bark

My Dev Story

I’m 21 years old sitting in a university hallway. My first lesson in programming is about to start. I’m studying for a bachelors degree in electronics but this class is with the computer science students. They talk loudly about what their favorite programming language is. I hear someone mention “Python”. Weird name for a programming language.

The Rough Start

As we were heavily outnumbered by the computer science students, the pacing of the class was VERY fast. They had heard it all before and were eager to get to the hard stuff. Every lesson was a cold shower. And it got colder and colder.

Going in to study programming I thought it would be a fun experience. Maybe not “FUN” fun but at least math level fun. But I mostly felt stupid. Maybe my brain wiring worked for math but not for programming.

By the final few lectures things picked up a bit as we were able to try C# instead of just C and C++. C# code felt easier to read. For the final project made an attempt to build a simple RSS reader. This felt exciting since content would come flying in from the internet.

The RSS feed was in XML, a format I had never seen before. So instead of these 3 lines:

using System.Xml;
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load("c:\\temp.xml");

I wrote the worst XML parser that world has seen. I did some questionable pattern matching and it probably only worked for that exact RSS feed. After the course I felt pretty done with programming and I moved on.

IT Guy

4 years later I had graduated and was working at my first job. I was a network admin and my boss told me about an upcoming task. “The switches are old and need to be replaced”. There were 200+ switches. Log in to every switch and export their configurations. Then apply the configurations on the new switches. Oh and the switch manufacturer is different so you need to adjust every configuration to fit the new switch. Ouch. I was looking at weeks of mind numbing work. Of course there were no off the shelf tools for such a specific task.

I saw two paths ahead:

1. Bite the bullet and get to work with slow but guaranteed progress.
2. Face my previous programming trauma to see if its possible to solve it with a script.

I thought I might as well fail path two before I default to path one. Then at least I will know it was the only option. I asked my boss to approve me possibly wasting a few days prototyping a scripted solution. He was onboard.

Bash vs Powershell

Now I hade to pick my tool for the job. Going by just by the name, Powershell has to be the superior choice right? Yup, Powershell was my choice.

• Day 1 was scary but after making a successful login to a switch I got some confidence. After I was able to download a configuration from said switch to my local PC I started to think that this might actually be possible.
• Day 2 I transformed to switch port configuration to CSV to get a nice overview in excel. Everything looked solid. I made another CSV of switches and created a loop around my solution. Wow! All of a sudden a working script seemed within reach and I caught myself having more fun at work than ever before. The final step would be to produce properly formatted port configurations for the new switches.
• Day 3 in the afternoon I was ready to let my wild script roam the admin network and visit 200+ switches. As you can imagine I was pretty nervous. This was uncharted territory.

I was amazed

The script ran for around 2 minutes. Then I was done. The whole task was done. With the script, weeks of work was done in 2 minutes. What a high!

Then and there I decided to switch careers and learn programming. I finally saw the usefulness and power of programming automation. And I got some confidence that with practice I could become a good programmer just like the data science students.

Now after 3 programming jobs, a programming youtube channel and 100+ hobby projects, I am really happy I gave programming another shot after my initial setbacks.

I got to produce a tutorial video for the freecodecamp youtube channel and it seen by hundreds of thousands of people learning how to program. That would have been hard to believe for the discouraged student giving up on programming.

I feel very grateful for finding something I really enjoy that is at the same time a great career.

If you find that you do like the craft of programming, your work life will be a blast! So give it a full honest try if you haven’t yet.

Thanks for reading :)

Written by Daniel Bark