So, I graduated in 2013 with BCom in Finance. I'm short sighted( chronic one, have been like this for more than 10 years), I have hearing impairment and to top it up I wasn't that good with my grades either so poor GPA.
For context, I had to pay TSH 10000 for someone to open an email for me so I can apply for college loan, meaning I never had any kind of access to computers until I was in college.
Fast forward, I graduated. The only valuable thing I had is a Laptop my sister bought for me since I couldn't attend lectures( can't see , can't hear and no one cares anyways) and I have to give myself the an education and needed to survive 3 years. This opened doors to the world of the World Wide Web, I read Wikipedia, mastered the art of googling and all those tricks to get the right information.
So, back home after college. There was no way for me to get a job, because.
* I can't last past the first screening , I had issues with communication
* I sucked at finance. I self educated myself so I was picky on what to learn, the jobs on the other hand were looking for people who had high grades and balanced accounts in their heads( pun intended)
It was me and my laptop, I gave up the prospect of being employed. I was too depressed to leave my room. So, I started programming to kill time and keep at bay the thought of suicide.
I started with PHP after playing for it for a while I wasn't that impressed I moved to Python, then Ruby then Erlang. Along the way I was learning and experimenting with all kinds of technologies I can grab for free on the internet be it CSS, HTML, Sass, etc.
Back then there was chronic power outages, so blackout were daily.
My routine was
* Leave the lights on, * Wake up when the lights are on( the power is back), and start coding. * Sleep when the power goes off ( blackout ) * Repeat the above steps for days in days out
I was earning 0, I decided to look for programming gig, I was depressed even more. there are only PHP shops here, in one occasion the lead engineer of one shop told me python was not a programming language.
When all hopes were lost, I came across this language called Go( Golang ). The way I was productive in it inspired me to think about building my own apps one day. So, I started sharing my projects on github. I was writing thousands of lines of Go like crazy. Just chasing the dead dreams. I can't remember how many unfinished ideas there was.
It was't until 2015 I decided to sum up my Go experinece into a little project I called utron. Utron was MVC framework for Go, which I hand rolled and loved, It caught attention of redditors and landed here on HN.
I landed my first gig november the same year. I moved to my own place and I have been independent ever since.
SUMMARY: Time is generous to all of us, keep doing what you feel is the right thing to do.
CONTEXT: I still program in Go, I'm probably the only professional Go programmer in my country (Tanzania) according to Github, folks here have no idea what I'm up to but that never stopped me from believing.