Past experience has shown me that the only way to start a new writing project is to just sit down and start, so this is me starting.
Welcome to Writing Code, an online account of someone who dropped out of programming in college to become an accountant, then in turn dropped accounting to write novels full-time for four and a half years, only to go back to accounting and then decide to try his hand at programming.
Given an intro like that, it would be reasonable for you to assume that I’m the kind of person that doesn’t stick with anything for very long, but the opposite is actually the truth. I was an accountant for nine years before I quit so that I could write full time, and I’d been writing books for at least 10 or 11 years before I quit accounting so that I could write full-time.
I’m really good at accounting, and there are aspects of accounting that I really like, but it was never one of my loves the way that writing was. In the same vein, I did reasonably well as a writer, and would still be doing that if not for the fact that most people who want to read my books decided that they were unwilling to pay for the opportunity to do so (once my books made it out onto the torrent sites).
I feel like I’ve given both writing and accounting a solid decade each out of my life, and at my most recent accounting job, I’ve ended up having to delve into the technical side of the business much more than you would expect out of a normal financial controller.
It turns out, that I’m much better at that than anyone at work originally suspected I would be, so I’ve decided to see if I can pick up enough software engineering expertise to broaden my horizons to where I could eventually have a startup of my own, or failing that, take advantage of having expertise in two domains and parlay that into a higher paying job than what I could get as either just an accountant or just a programmer.
I hope that you’ll find some use, or some enjoyment following along as I chronicle the parts of my transition that are safe for me to comment on.
It’s probably helpful for you as the reader to have an idea both of how often I plan on updating this blog, and my rough level of expertise as I start this endeavor. For the first, my goal is to roll out weekly updates. The updates will probably be fairly short to start out with given that most of my insights will revolve around how coding interacts with accounting, but as I get deeper into this new world, hopefully the updates will get longer.
As for the second, I’m not quite starting at square one, but I’m pretty close to that. I had a year and a half of C++ programming back in college. Since then, at my current job, I’ve become fairly adept at understanding SQL, both when it comes to getting the data out of the tables, and with regards to how to design tables in order to address the underlying needs of whatever problem it is that I’m trying to solve.
More recently, I’ve completed tutorials in Python, and Java, and I’ve begun a tutorial in JavaScript. That means I’m familiar with concepts like loops and functions, and that I’ve played around a little bit with objects and classes, but that there is a whole world of things that right now I don’t even know that I don’t know.
So, if that sounds interesting to you — either because you’re considering becoming a programmer, or because you’re managing junior developers — then I hope you enjoy the ride here at Writing Code.