Three months into committing into the career change, I attempted to set up a WordPress site using Docker on my Synology NAS. Oh boy, it failed miserably at the time due to a “database error”. I revisited it in 2023 to finally figure out it was something to do with linking my WordPress container to the MySQL database. Due to my difficulty in understanding YAML files, I couldn’t make sense of what was going on at the time, but the fix was literally one line of code to make it the website work… I spent an entire week trying to make a website at the time… gave up and came back to it after a year… to only figure out it was one line of code I needed to change…
Here’s my first piece of advice: when you’re learning IT, there are tutorials that hold your hand. However, when you start working on a small project on your own, that’s when the real challenges emerge.
There’s a significant learning curve that suddenly appears out of nowhere. Take a look at the diagram below, particularly the prominent bulge. This represents the stage after the basic, hand-holding tutorials when you attempt to build something from scratch.
Suddenly, there’s much more to learn compared to the tutorials, and building projects (which you should be doing) will force you to learn. This is a sticking point for many, but if you expect it to be more challenging than you initially thought, you’ll have greater patience and be more willing to persevere.
As you progress through this stage, the amount you need to learn to become job-ready decreases. Similar to learning another language, initially, it’s challenging to converse with someone because you need to know the alphabet, syntax, and grammar. However, with practice and more interactions, you’ll primarily use what you already know, integrating fewer unfamiliar words or phrases as you speak to more people.
This diagram is related to coding, but the same principle applies to learning IT to become job-ready. I HIGHLY recommend reading the blog “Why Learning to Code is So Damn Hard” By Erik Trautman from which I obtained this picture. It discusses all the stages of learning coding before you are job-ready in which the principles are the same for an IT career.
Who knows this way you might enjoy it, and the more you enjoy it the more likely you are to continue on doing it.
Even if you wake up feeling like an angry Homer Simpsons because you can’t get the virtual machine internet to work, even though they are in the same subnet (temporarily), but then you find out you are running a DHCP server that’s providing IP addresses to your devices, but you’re stubborn and keep trying to manually change the IP on the Linux network card to make it work – and it does for about 20 seconds before it reverts back. But then.. then you find out about about IP address reversation that would of save you an entire day of trouble shooting AAAAHHHHHHHHHHH! … the lowest low makes the highest high they say 🙂