Othmane Lamnabhi
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I always wanted to be an Astronaut.

I'm not lying, I did want to become an astronaut when I was a kid. (and I did achieve it... I'm always spacing out 😂) I just discovered something better along the way.

Have I always known I wanted to work in tech? of course not.

Before age 12, I didn't even know what a computer was, I remember then doing the dishes so I could get a dollar for my labor, a dollar that I would later use to play Virtua Cop 2 in a cybercafe around the corner. In another life, it could have been the end of the story. But life has a funny way of doing things.

Chapter 1: Soufiane

First year of middle school, I met my first nudge towards tech, his name was Soufiane and to me back then, he was god. MS-DOS had nothing on him, he was writing commands and navigating the OS so confidently while I was scared witless of breaking anything. I was like a sponge absorbing anything he was doing and I had never been more fascinated in my life. We'd spend afternoons trying to install multiples OSes on my computer, we'd try different software pieces, we'd try our hand at making a website, then we'd learn Google Sketchup and compete about who'd make the best house or object...

At the time, I spent countless hours in front of my computer screen, which was not to my parents' liking. They saw my computer as the devil's creation here to distract me from my studies. Countless times, they had to literally pull the plug or screen connector and hide it from me only so I can use the printer one... (they eventually found out, because they started checking the top of the screen for any signs of warmth 😂)

One sentence though I'll always remember

"you don't have to be scared, what's the worst that could happen? I'll fix it".

Those words uttered by Soufiane were the beginning of everything for me. I was devouring computer magazines by the dozen, I was no coder but that certainly did not stop me from reading content I couldn't grasp yet. Deep inside, I also wanted to be at that place where the teacher surpasses the master, to tip the balance and start being useful to him.

Chapter 2: Simo

By end of high school, I was the most tech-savvy of my friends and as much as I wanted to pursue studies in computer science, there was no way I'd get into university with my grades nor did we have the money to get me into a private school, so I went the traditional route and got a Bachelor's degree in Management before enrolling for Masters.

During the course of my university years, I met my second nudge towards tech, his name was Simo and we got to know each other through the alumni association of an exchange program we both participated in. That guy was a genius, he was everything I wanted to become, proficient at so many things. One day, he'd be making an app for students that scrapes Foursquare data to create his own database and reference all coffee places with power plugs and reliable wifi. Then next, he'd be working on a smoking habit tracker that triggers with two clicks of the phone's side button. I remember reading his resume once and thinking "how can one learn this many languages?", but the thing I'll always remember about him is using code to automate whatever could be automated and to give life to his own ideas.

Chapter 3: Passion

After graduation, I had one certainty, corporate finance was not for me. (it was one expensive certainty though 😅) And since I couldn't be a developer because I didn't get the proper education, I tried as best as I could to get close to the field. (this was my line of thought at the time)

As fate would have it, I started working for a startup in 2016, the concept was similar to thefork and out of the three of us, I was supposed to be the CTO. WordPress seemed like the obvious choice at the time, so I worked with local and international developers to build this website, and learned a lot along the way through editing it, debugging it, troubleshooting it and optimizing it.

My goal, as I said before, was to gravitate around the world of tech, computers and devs, and that's how I stumbled on my current job. Small digital agency with a decent client portfolio and lots of things to build, exactly my kind of party. In that adventure, I brought with me the one who started it all, Soufiane, and together we started making WordPress websites for clients in-house.

I got interested in social media advertising and soon after started launching full-blown multi-platform campaigns and deploying funnels. To be truthful, I always felt like some sort of hacker when I was implementing pixels or using Google Tag Manager to track customer behavior.

In my current job, I was/am fortunate enough to have a very understanding boss who trusted me despite not knowing much about me... I was hired while having no experience in Digital Marketing and close to little experience in web development but I was VERY eager to learn and it showed. I asked for a laptop so I could do some of the work while commuting to work or from home (resulting in my first MacBook Pro), then one week later I wanted full access to the whole Facebook Business Manager with admin privileges. Thinking back... I myself wouldn't have trusted a stranger with that. But the trust placed in me and the autonomy I was given is what allowed me to explore different roads while always trying to answer one question

"how can I create value for my company? how can I contribute with my current skillset? and if I don't possess it, how can I acquire it efficiently?".

Clients were seemingly happy, boss was happy, but it felt to me like I did it all and I was nowhere close to being a developer. And when I'd look back, I'd always remember two occurrences very vividly and the happiness and excitement they brought me:

  • The first Excel report I automated using Visual Basic, going from 2-3 work days to 30 seconds. I was fed up with doing it every month and time spent making it was time I could spend building something.
  • My first unintentional contribution on GitHub, while I was trying to make a Lynda.com course downloader work on my computer. I remember reporting the issue to the project owner, then followed a bunch of emails of me sharing my findings and exchanging on my successes and failures while trying to fix a project made in a language I never encountered before, Python. He later asked me to make an official contribution to the repo so that my efforts won't go unnoticed, and that meant the absolute world to me.

Chapter 4: Meriem

2020 was here, and I had come to the decision that I wanted to live abroad. I had many reasons to do so, one of them being that I had never fully experienced my exchange year back in 2006 due to my young age and that there was so much to see beyond the bubble I lived in. And so, the Canada project began. But fate again had another say in the matter, and I don't think anyone accounted for a pandemic happening (except for conspiracy theorists maybe?) or lasting as long as it has been lasting so far.

Over the next few months, as borders closed up and uncertainty reigned in, I understood that this project of mine was not going to happen as soon as I wanted it to. I wanted to start everything over from scratch like I do with my new devices 😅 new life, new entourage, new everything. Why not seize this opportunity to go for the job and field I have always wanted?

And as these thoughts started shaping up in my mind, I met my third nudge towards tech, Meriem. We met through Twitter, and I knew back then was that she worked in tech and that she was involved in an initiative called Geeksblabla. Meriem was very genuine, and also very supportive. One night, as I was telling her about regretting not jumping on the dev bandwagon she asked me

"what's stopping you? there are literally thousands of resources out there."

before proceeding to mention the ONE resource that got me down the rabbit hole, FreeCodeCamp.

Chapter 5: Zackaria

By January 2021, I was deeply entangled within the webs, eating and breathing HTML and CSS for a month. And while I was learning and deeply invested in the process, I excitedly told a friend of mine about it, Zackaria.

After a week went by, he told me he created a FreeCodeCamp account as well, to learn to code. As we were progressing through our journeys, it felt amazing to have someone to share your struggles with as well as your frustrations and successes. We were pursuing the same course and we held each other accountable, which admittedly played a huge role in keeping us on track. At one point each of us took a different road as he chose a Javascript course to pursue and I chose another... it was the first time we weren't working on / studying the same thing. But as the days went by, my interest was waning and the course was not engaging. I started wondering if the issue was with the language? me? Until Zackaria shared with me a snippet of his course Javascript Simplified by Kyle Cook which instantly got me instantly hooked.

As you guessed, Zackaria was my fourth nudge towards tech.

Final chapter: It never ends

Since I embarked on this adventure, my days usually went like this:

  • 9am-6pm: work day
  • 7pm-2am: code night
  • weekends: me, my code and I

When I started up, I had a list of technologies I wanted to learn and work with, I did not know back then what they were all useful for but I knew they were popular out there and that I'd have to learn them at some point (React for instance).

When I decided to work on Twiginity, I knew HTML, CSS and Javascript along with Node/Express and MongoDB and as I was close to finishing the backend, I was benchmarking some tools and I remember wondering how it was possible for them to refresh just a fraction of the page without actually triggering a full refresh.

That's how my research led me to frameworks like React and Vue, so I paused work on my project and started to learn React so I could come back to my app with a new usable skillset.

Fast forward to a year later, I learned to work with a wide array of technologies and even managed to put them to good use in my day job which feels amazing.

  • I'm thankful for every day I kept pushing through.
  • I'm thankful for all the knowledge out there.
  • I'm thankful for the supportive people I have met (and excited for the ones I'll meet).
  • I'm grateful to my four major nudges and probably all the little ones I might have forgotten to mention.

There is literally not a single day where I don't learn something new either through working on my project, or through reading or taking on courses. To be able not only to understand code that was so foreign to me not so long ago but also to write it is one of the most underrated superpowers I'm grateful to possess today.

Final words

This blog post was supposed to be a walk down memory lane where I wanted and needed to remind myself that:

  • No path is linear, you will sometimes stray from where you want to go or maybe you'll get lost along the way but as long as you keep moving you're bound to find a trail.
  • There is no ONE TRUE path to your goal.
  • No matter what it takes or how long it takes, if you want it, you can achieve it. Passion is not the only driver though (consistency is).
  • we're creatures of inspiration, you can be someone's Soufiane or Mohammed, or Meriem or Zackaria for all I know. Sometimes all it takes is a word to trigger something inside.

I know that I am barely scratching the surface, and that things are about to heat up. Job-seeking in tech is another beast I'll have to tame, but I'm very much looking forward to that.