My entry into the profession was, to put it mildly, unconventional.
I was 15 or 16. My family moved a lot, and hardware was a luxury. But I had an old Lenovo tablet that was barely holding on.
That's how I learned to code: HTML and CSS typed on a virtual keyboard on one half of the screen, the result on the other half. A mini-IDE from the survival era.
And yes — I actually built websites on a tablet. Not out of romance. Out of having no alternatives.
The call
At 16 I posted my resume on a job board and moved on with life. A couple of days later, someone started calling persistently. Naturally, I didn't pick up — could be anyone: a bank, debt collectors, the army, surprise relatives... why risk it.
They kept calling. And calling. At some point it started feeling like picking up would change my life. Turned out it did.
It was a job. They invited me for an interview.
The interview
Then came the classic "get in at any cost" moment.
They asked me about PHP, WordPress, MySQL, FileZilla. I nodded confidently: "Yes, I know it, of course, I've worked with it."
Meanwhile, the internal monologue was going: "You don't know any of this. Hold it together. Just don't let them figure out you got here by accident."
They hired me.
The routine
And then everything became very simple. During the day — school. After class — the office, first tasks, first real websites, first professional adaptation. In the summer I was the most typical office worker: in at 10, out at 6 — as if I were 30, not 16.
Looking back
It's funny now. It all sounds like a caricature of "getting into tech." But in reality, circumstances like these shape exactly the right kind of character:
- Work with what you have
- Learn faster than you can be afraid
- Don't wait for perfect conditions
If I think about it, my entire path grew from that tablet. The ability to figure things out, to learn under fire, and to keep going even when there are no resources.
Despite the circumstances — not because of them.