I wanted to write about topic I feel not many people are talking much about. Growing up in a low-income neighborhood in Northern Kentucky, I was just lucky enough to get out of the public school system without falling into drugs or ending up pregnant like many of my classmates had done. I went to the local university and got my degree. But, one thing I wondered about as I change careers from an academian to a web developer, and look at all the great developers out there, is Who Can Become a Developer?

Many of the great developers in the field came from amazing technical schools like MIT, Stanford, and Rochester. We all know that although Mark Zuckerberg didn't graduate college, he did attend Harvard, and that Steve Jobs was twiddling with engineer friends in garages in sunny Silicon Valley. When I was growing up as a kid, I had a rough backyard connected to three houses, and my playground was a cracked sidewalk, and I didn't get a computer until around 1997 which I had to share with my two sisters. My parents didn't speak English. I didn't have Algebra until I was in high school, and when I went to college I only took a linear math class and that was it.

The internet was growing and maturing around the 2000s, but I barely heard about its importance until just recently in the late 2010's when Google and Apple began producing amazing technologies, and spewing out the word Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Although not everyone is cut out for the web development world, I just wonder how many poor background people do actually reach up in the world of programming given they had to start at a later stage in life? Or was I the one that was just a bit late?

I'm writing this because today I decided to start an online coding school called Thinkful. It's a 6-month program that's suppose to provide full stack knowledge in things like node, express and react. I really hope to learn the ins-and-outs of the development world, but after reading this crazy article about learning JavaScript in 2016 and this other one about the state of JavaScript, I feel like I'm still very far behind. Starting late in the game is a pretty tough ordeal, but giving up I think would be even more disappointing. There's so much to learn, and if I stop now, I know I will be missing out on some amazing things in the future.