NOTE: Adzerk is now called Kevel. We rebranded in 2020.

Today marks my one-year anniversary of working at Adzerk, which also means I have now been working professionally as a software developer for one year. I could not be happier to be programming for a living, and I’m still not really over the fact that it was as easy as it was for me to break into a career that I had no prior work experience in, without a computer science degree.

Software development is a pretty unique industry in that respect, at least in the start-up world. It seems that most software start-ups are keenly aware of the fact that the best programmers are not necessarily the ones with CS degrees or years of work experience developing software at some large corporation (although neither of these are necessarily bad things). It is important that you have a certain baseline of programming skills – which can be learned by studying independently and working on hobby projects, like I did – but the other main ingredient isn’t education or experience, it’s just having the right mindset.

I wrote a piece on the Adzerk tech blog, if you’re curious to read more:

Getting Your First Programming Job: Not as Hard as You Think