Back in the day, my career path was focused more on which jobs would kill me rather than what I would be good at. In high school, the career software they had running on the machines matched me with a funeral director, which I always found amusing. I vividly remember when I was 14-15, requesting an army promotional VHS tape. Watched it, thinking I would love to be in the army if I was fit enough to do something useful and learn a skill. I wanted to join the air defense, which at the time was a SAM site operator.
With the progression of high school, in year 11, when I was 15, I started becoming interested in programming. I started off with HTML, then quickly progressed to PHP. MySQL came naturally with it, and by 2000, I was busy building blogs and the like. Then, free will happened when I finished high school, and I went to college, then ultimately university, where I picked up Unix, etc. A career path was always focused on IT ensued.
Now, looking back, I always wondered what would have happened if I did join the army. How would it have shaped me and where would my life be? I’m a firm believer in natural progression, going with the flow and where the wind takes me. I do enjoy IT work, hardware or programming, but especially DB development and reporting. There is something quite satisfying about writing a mega join SQL statement that doesn’t cripple the server.
In conclusion
I’m struggling to think if there was another dream career, but no, I am quite happy with this one and the imaginary soldier life, haha. Charity work is my primary function these days, which is very rewarding at times and keeps me busy.
