The naval engineer who became a dev

I had every chance to become a programmer years before I did, and I turned each one down.

In the 90s, a friend tried to teach me HTML. I shrugged. Later, others suggested I pick up VBA, then JavaScript. Each time I said no, not because I couldn't, but because I had no real reason to. There was no problem in front of me that I actually wanted to solve with code. Without that, learning to program felt like learning a language for a country I never planned to visit.

Manaus, a shipyard, and a spreadsheet at its limit

The turning point came when I was living in Manaus and running my own naval engineering company. Part of the work was producing stability calculations and the critical documentation that goes with them, the paperwork that says a vessel is safe to be on the water. I was doing it in Excel, and Excel was buckling under it. The spreadsheets were fragile, slow, and one bad cell away from a serious mistake.

So, finally, I had a problem I genuinely wanted to solve. I sat down and built a piece of software in VBA that automated the whole process, the calculations and the document generation. The result was not subtle: deliveries came out about three times faster, and far more accurate. It worked so well that pirated copies of my code started circulating around the region. As frustrating as that was, it was also the clearest signal I'd ever gotten that I'd built something genuinely useful.

I didn't fall in love with programming. I fell in love with solving a problem, and programming turned out to be the tool.

The click matters more than the credential

That experience convinced me of something I still believe. Succeeding in tech takes more than a bootcamp or a degree. Those help, but they don't supply the thing that actually carries you: a genuine click, that unshakeable drive to learn and keep growing.

I've come to spot the difference quickly. There are people who follow whatever's trending, chasing the hot framework because everyone else is. And there are people moved by genuine enthusiasm, who pick up a tool because there's something they want to build or fix. The second group goes further, every time. The trend-followers burn out when the trend moves; the curious ones just find the next thing they want to understand.

If you're sitting on the fence about getting into tech, my advice isn't "enroll in a course." It's "find a problem you actually care about, and let it pull you in." That's how a naval engineer ended up writing software for a living, and never looked back.