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Personal story of finding my passion

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TL;DR - I fell on my head and started coding, I never stopped

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This is the story of how I found the passion for software development in my life.

Until 2016 life had always been good to me. I had been cycling through it, pretty much without any noticeable bumps.

My childhood was worryless.

In high school I had a few nice results as a runner/athlete.
There I also found my passion for science through math and physics competitions.
I met my high school sweetheart, who is still my sweetheart today.
I graduated as an engineer Electromechanics and was following up on that with a study of civil engineering in aeronautics.
And I was part of an amazing group of friends through the youth movement and college fraternity in which I was involved.

Two years earlier I had kicked of my career as a cyclist.
I found out I had some talent and booked my first successes.
I chased the dream of becoming a professional.

Dark clouds

July 2nd, 2016.. I was racing the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in the minus 23 years categorie. At 70 kph I got thrown of the road and crashed into the concrete road furniture.
Though it will turn out to be one of the turning points in my life I, myself, do not remember this moment.

You can imagine that at 70kph the bang was quite heavy. My bike broke into two pieces. My helmet shattered.

One week in my life has been blacked out.
I woke up in the hospital with 6! fractures and severe cerebral trauma.
Though it was severe bad luck to fall of the bike in the first place, I had major good luck to be able to wake up from it at all.

I did fully recover. To be honest, I probably wouldn't dare telling this story if I hadn't.

Still.. As you can imagine, recovering took me some time. In the beginning I couldn't finish my sentences. I couldn't orientate myself on the roads anymore. And once in the supermarket I was unable to check out cause couldn't remember my pin to pay for my goods.
I lost my driver's license, couldn't go back to school and was unable to ride my bike.

Sky clearing up

In order to recover I needed brain training.
I decided to revisit the Java Programming course I had received in college. I had been interested in programming since my youth and this was the ideal time to get deeper into that.

And that's when the ball really got rollin'.
I went through the course in no time. So I enrolled for a course on programming that was taught during the evening.
Via Udacity I found the 'Google Android developer scholarship'.
Soon I was building an app to track my food inventory.
I created a mobile app to solve riddles.
In my head a lot of ideas started popping up for apps to build in the future. When the nice summer weather came I found myself willing to stay inside to write code.

By that time I had been cleared with "fully recovered".
After the summer I could go back to school to continue my aeronotics engineering eduction. However I had my diploma as an Engineer Electromechanics already in the bag.
And I recently discovered my urge to be a "creator" by writing software. emoji-star2

Head in the cloud

I decided to follow my newly found passion! emoji-cloud emoji-sparkles
And man, have I not regretted that for one moment since! I applied for a job as a software developer at Sogeti. And that's where I kicked of my software career. However, after a few months I felt stuck.
I had just fought back from a major setback, I wasn't planning on standing still now. That's why I switched to Ordina Jworks. I really kickstarted my career there. It's also how I flew into the cloud. I started working at Nike. I saw the amazing things cloud technology enables. Serverless became my thing.

It's amazing what you can achieve when adopting a serverless first mindset!

Floating on..

I wanted to go serverless-first.
Leveraging all the cloud managed services to get things done! Quickly and qualitatively!

That's how I recently joined cloudway. They also have that same mindset.

And now I'm spreading that serverless mindset.
I became a self-declared serverless evangelist.

I'm co-starting Serverlessdays Belgium.
I have spoken and will be speaking about Serverless at conferences and meetups.

And I try to spread as much serverless knowledge as possible via twitter and hopefully also via this website!

I am no longer cycling first, I am serverless first, floating in the cloud, leveraging it to the fullest.

Community

The serverless community is a very warm and helpful community. I encourage you to reach out to the community if you have any serverless related questions. Personally I'd recommend Twitter to do so.
There are also great podcasts, articles, blogs..

Don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have any questions!

Resources and contacts

Sources