Daniel May

I’m gonna talk about myself for the majority of this post, so if you don’t find me interesting – it’s probably not worth your time. Thought I’d warn you.

As many of you know, I’m young. I’m 17 years old with a permanent job in software development – which is rare. I don’t think I’ve come across anyone else with a professional software development job this early on (most probably because all the other teenage nerds are taking the standard college –> uni –> job approach) – but if you’re out there, contact me!

It’s not been easy, but it’s not been particularly hard either. I have been developing actively since I was around 11 years of age, with advice from my father and an introduction to the basics by him. I was instantly interested and wanted to learn more. I loved it. I loved the moment I wrote my first program, to the moment I moved on and wrote my first line of PHP code. It is my passion, and I discovered it at a young age. This is when I first started self-learning.

The first book I ever bought was “Teach yourself VB.NET 2003 in 21 days” – Granted, it was a “XX days” book, but it taught me the basics of what I needed to know. Best 3 weeks of pocket money I’ve ever spent.

I continued to code, moving from VB6 to VB.NET to PHP, including MySQL, playing around with python and various other languages. This kept me busy throughout high school – I scored a number of freelance jobs doing things ranging from data entry to MySQL database design… I daresay I was earning more than the majority of my high school friends, at the price of having next to no social life.  I kept learning through various portals such as online tutorials, problem solving – I was so interested about 90% of my time outside of high school was spent learning for my passion, knowing that at some point it would reward me.

Then came GCSEs. I took a course in DiDA (Diploma in Digital Applications) which I thought would help me carry on to take a computing or programming course at college – it did, but it was nowhere near as technical as I was at that age. Unfortunately, VLOOKUPs in Excel aren’t something I want to be doing for a career – each to their own, though. Albeit bored, I passed these and even got to do some HTML and CSS in the end. Go me.

I finally made it into college and took a computing course – much to my dismay, they were teaching VB6. VB6 in 2008/9. A ten-year-old technology being taught? I can understand the reasons for doing so (simplicity, being eased into development), but was VB6 really the best option? Why not Python? Support for VB6 ended in ‘05, extended support ended in early ‘08. Either way, it was a breeze for me and I was accepted onto the gifted and talented programme. Good stuff. Unfortunately, it was nearing the end of my first year that I decided I didn’t want to do this anymore. I was sick of the constant VB6 re-learning, sick of being miles ahead of my classmates (imagine this as modest as humanly possible). It wasn’t fun and was no longer interesting. I dropped out.

I grabbed myself a few books outlining .NET, compsci concepts, algorithm development and read quite a lot of online blogs – and this helped me reach my first job. A professional .NET development job for someone with purely self-taught knowledge.

It is this that I believe separates me from the crowd. I didn’t go to university. I can’t tell you intrisically how the floating point system works nor can I tell you precisely how the garbage collector in .NET completely works. What I can tell you is that in time, I will know. I will learn these things. Either by myself or via tutoring.

I by no means claim to be an expert. I merely claim that given time and training, I will be. I was born for this.

- Daniel May