I got my first computer in sixth grade of elementary school. From that moment on, I spent my school brakes and weekends playing games all day long. When I was 12 years old, I was already dreaming about how I would one day be making those games I was playing. My further education was directed that way, I studied Informatics at Faculty of Organizational Sciences. This all makes my story seem kind of expected and „regular“. But the term of events that lead to me getting my first computer was everything but expected.

Parent’s divorce usually affects lots of children in a terrible and stressful way. The affect my parent’s divorce had on me was a bit different. My father is a conservative man and he always believed in patriarchy. His thoughts were that a women should be a housewife. When he met my mother, she was a student of Faculty of Biology, but thanks to his influence, she gave up her studies so she could commit to our family. Nine years later and with no working experience, she was a divorcee that had to support two daughters. She started her career as a cleaning lady in IT sector of one company. Four exhausting years later, she started working as Software Developer at that same company. Instead of settling for any incomes (considering she had two small daughters waiting for her at home), my mother started studying informatics at age of 35 and now she has a bachelor’s and master’s degree at Faculty of Organizational Sciences. As a role model, I had a mother that worked for 11 hours a day to achieve what she managed to achieve. She showed me that I can be anything I wish to be and never to let anyone convince me otherwise.

She was the one that bought me my first computer. Her colleagues installed a bunch of computer games that made me wish I could develop something similar, and that I later spent years testing. 

Thanks to my mum’s influence, I didn’t wait until I was 35 to start pursuing my career as a software developer. At age of 24, I started working at ex PSTech, today’s Endava. I started as an intern on a Java project and ended up as C++ developer, which wasn’t as easy as I thought. Considering that I didn’t work on any C++ project during my studies, I was lucky to end up in a company that made transitioning to C++ a lot easier. Endava owns a rich library and organizes courses for various technologies. So they put me in a C++ boot camp and provided me with necessary C++ literature. Due to all of this, for the following two years I worked on one of the most exciting projects I have ever worked on.

I still may not be a game developer, but I work with amazing people in a company that provides many opportunities. Maybe the next in line is Unreal Engine boot camp.  Either way, I think that a twelve-year-old me would be pretty satisfied.