Since starting to learn coding and spending a lot of time interacting with my peers on Twitter it is fair to say that I have had many moments of contemplation as to whether or not I am too old to change careers and get into coding as a full-time profession.

However from my perspective I think the answer has to be that as long as you are open-minded, cognisant of the fact that to start with you will be heavily reliant on others for knowledge, and have a natural interest in what you are doing and is never too late to start learning anything.

I started my journey by watching courses on LinkedIn learning, which was provided by my employer, then moving onto sources of knowledge such as YouTube videos and Udemy courses/boot camps all of which I found absolutely fantastic as both sources of knowledge and and as inspiration to go forward to build things on my own.

One of the great things about online courses/tutorials are the references to tools and frameworks, that you have not yet tried or may not have known about, which all helps to enhance your wider appreciation of quite how diverse the tools available to you are.

I personally found all of these references to different things helped me to map out the areas that I wanted to learn and fine tune my personal learning experience e.g. you start with HTML then you must learn CSS then to do anything meaningful you must learn JavaScript which then lead you onto frameworks such as React/Angular/Vue can then lead to frameworks such as Django/Gatsby and the list goes on. Even having spent the best part of the year learning to code and having built all sorts of projects, some of which even got successfully deployed, it is difficult to get away from the “impostor syndrome” mentality and that I have come into this way too late.

However I take solace in the fact that during my career I have changed my profession three or four times each of which meant having a very steep learning curve in order to survive rather than sink. Therefore I am confident that I will be able to apply the same to coding and make a success of it, or at least have a really entertaining hobby, build some cool stuff and meet some amazing people along the way.

I think unless you’re an egomaniac it is always difficult to believe in yourself 100% but what we always need to remember is that we have come this far so why turn back now…