I learned the very basics to become a developer from Codeacademy. Back in 2015 I was a front line support technician at a small hardware startup who did Codeacademy in my free time, which was considerable. My first daughter had just been born and that really gave me motivation to learn and achieve my full potential. My boss was the only software engineer at our company and so was often overloaded with work, so he gave me small tasks to do, starting with learning regular expressions to massage a few thousand lines of data into something useful, and then getting to make PHP edits to Wordpress, and even some Visual C++.

I more than doubled my income from that job to my next job, propelling me to the middle class, and have since achieved consistently high pay raises over the last seven years without much difficulty.

As someone who dropped out of high school due to family issues and lack of motivation, I hope free resources like Codeacademy always exists on the internet and will be a pathway for those who have the aptitude to learn to code. For my personally it totally transformed my life as I was basically destitute before I got my first job as a web developer.