atro
New Contributor
Hey Fastlane Forum Lurkers,
I'm Eric and I wanted to present with you guys my new venture that I am starting and might as well make this one of those fancy progress thread i've been reading about. I am currently 24 years old with big dreams.
Story Time!!
So when I was 21 years old I managed to move out of my parents place with no college education and I landed a gig working for a small e-commerce company at this time working on photoshop and html/css(from what I learned in high school). I was offered $14 dollars an hour. My brother always worked on software and he showed me what he was able to build while I knew nothing. I went online with the little money I had and bought some books on the ruby programming language. This book was called "Learn to Program" by Chris Pine and it opened my eyes and I felt that I discovered my passion. I knew that when learning this new skill that I could not run before I can walk, I can not build badass fun software before learning what a String or an Array is in software. I needed a strong foundation but luckily that what I was learning happened to be in HIGH demand for jobs and they do NOT teach this programming language in a traditional college. After one unfortunate morning, my boss at the time decides to let me go and now I was jobless(probably because I was spending more time writing my personal programs on the job) because I wasn't delivering the website updates fast enough.
So I learned Ruby fast enough to talk comfortably and sell myself to this new company called Sleepy Giant Entertainment . I got a real taste of what working on a software team and writing software truly is, especially because 2 of the main engineers had left the company so everything was put on me. I was pretty much thrown in the deep end here trying to keep up with the demand, I knew nothing but I wanted to learn more that was almost an obsession. I had a thirst for learning everything as possible about software and I would read book after book and stay up until 12 AM writing code. While working here I was being demanded features working on software I had no experience of. I would work 80 hours per week and even spent 36 hours straight writing code(shitty code I could say now) but I pulled through. At this company I was making ONLY $35,000 but I had no experience so I was okay with this. 8 months go by and I learned enough to where I was a mid-level engineer but I was working on Family Guy's Game website that had over 4 million in traffic and Pokemon's website that had about 10 million'ish in traffic. I felt that I can build any server side application software with this new confidence I realized that I could be making 60k at least at another company and that's when I decided to leave my job for more pay.
This is where I moved to San Diego working for a company called BIT(don't want the company name to get index'd in google). I looked up the competitive salary and it wasn't 60k like I thought, it was 80k. I went into the interview with confidence and managed to do well in the interview so I threw them the number 90k for my salary and after negotiating they gave me 75k. I was used to be making 35k so I managed to almost double my salary and I was fine with this. In one year, I went from 14 dollars an hour to making $76,100.
BIT has been exploding in new traffic, I was working on the system that was serving tour dates for No Doubt, Justin Bieber, Lil Wayne. The iPhone/iOS application got a million downloads and I was building a system to support 10 million users+. 1.5 years later a friend of mine from Sony Network Entertainment told me that they were hiring and my second passion for video games stepped in ended up leaving BIT to work for Sony, I negotiated a with the same number as before and asked for 90k and they took it no questions asked. I thought to myself, damn I could have gotten a lot more.
Today!
Soooo now this brings to where I am at today, currently making 90k as a Software Engineer at Sony Network Entertainment working on the Playstation Network I achieved this in 3 years with no college degree and self taught many programming languages but what I use mainly is Ruby & JavaScript.
So this isn't enough for me. For Sony to pay me 90k for my skills, for this subsidiary to have roughly 1000 employees and make 1.99 billion dollars in revenue I feel a bit cheated out.
I need to start something on my own and get out of this rat race. I need this freedom that MJ talks about in the wealth trinity.
My New Venture
So in the start of May I have been programming my own social game on the side, I have been programming my own API server and when I worked at BIT I learned a lot about Facebook's Open Graph so I will be able to fully engulf their API's in this new project. Now I just need to finish this and market it as soon as possible.
My previous thirst for knowledge that I had for Software has now been switched to Business. I have a deep passion for writing code but now I want to learn how to sell this game so I am starting small with a basic 2D game.
In future posts I will post up more progress on the game and if anyone is interested I can let some of you guys test out the game on my private secured server.
If you have any advice, comments, concerns I would love to hear it.
I really appreciate the early feedback and thanks for reading!!
-Eric
I'm Eric and I wanted to present with you guys my new venture that I am starting and might as well make this one of those fancy progress thread i've been reading about. I am currently 24 years old with big dreams.
Story Time!!
So when I was 21 years old I managed to move out of my parents place with no college education and I landed a gig working for a small e-commerce company at this time working on photoshop and html/css(from what I learned in high school). I was offered $14 dollars an hour. My brother always worked on software and he showed me what he was able to build while I knew nothing. I went online with the little money I had and bought some books on the ruby programming language. This book was called "Learn to Program" by Chris Pine and it opened my eyes and I felt that I discovered my passion. I knew that when learning this new skill that I could not run before I can walk, I can not build badass fun software before learning what a String or an Array is in software. I needed a strong foundation but luckily that what I was learning happened to be in HIGH demand for jobs and they do NOT teach this programming language in a traditional college. After one unfortunate morning, my boss at the time decides to let me go and now I was jobless(probably because I was spending more time writing my personal programs on the job) because I wasn't delivering the website updates fast enough.
So I learned Ruby fast enough to talk comfortably and sell myself to this new company called Sleepy Giant Entertainment . I got a real taste of what working on a software team and writing software truly is, especially because 2 of the main engineers had left the company so everything was put on me. I was pretty much thrown in the deep end here trying to keep up with the demand, I knew nothing but I wanted to learn more that was almost an obsession. I had a thirst for learning everything as possible about software and I would read book after book and stay up until 12 AM writing code. While working here I was being demanded features working on software I had no experience of. I would work 80 hours per week and even spent 36 hours straight writing code(shitty code I could say now) but I pulled through. At this company I was making ONLY $35,000 but I had no experience so I was okay with this. 8 months go by and I learned enough to where I was a mid-level engineer but I was working on Family Guy's Game website that had over 4 million in traffic and Pokemon's website that had about 10 million'ish in traffic. I felt that I can build any server side application software with this new confidence I realized that I could be making 60k at least at another company and that's when I decided to leave my job for more pay.
This is where I moved to San Diego working for a company called BIT(don't want the company name to get index'd in google). I looked up the competitive salary and it wasn't 60k like I thought, it was 80k. I went into the interview with confidence and managed to do well in the interview so I threw them the number 90k for my salary and after negotiating they gave me 75k. I was used to be making 35k so I managed to almost double my salary and I was fine with this. In one year, I went from 14 dollars an hour to making $76,100.
BIT has been exploding in new traffic, I was working on the system that was serving tour dates for No Doubt, Justin Bieber, Lil Wayne. The iPhone/iOS application got a million downloads and I was building a system to support 10 million users+. 1.5 years later a friend of mine from Sony Network Entertainment told me that they were hiring and my second passion for video games stepped in ended up leaving BIT to work for Sony, I negotiated a with the same number as before and asked for 90k and they took it no questions asked. I thought to myself, damn I could have gotten a lot more.
Today!
Soooo now this brings to where I am at today, currently making 90k as a Software Engineer at Sony Network Entertainment working on the Playstation Network I achieved this in 3 years with no college degree and self taught many programming languages but what I use mainly is Ruby & JavaScript.
So this isn't enough for me. For Sony to pay me 90k for my skills, for this subsidiary to have roughly 1000 employees and make 1.99 billion dollars in revenue I feel a bit cheated out.
I need to start something on my own and get out of this rat race. I need this freedom that MJ talks about in the wealth trinity.
My New Venture
So in the start of May I have been programming my own social game on the side, I have been programming my own API server and when I worked at BIT I learned a lot about Facebook's Open Graph so I will be able to fully engulf their API's in this new project. Now I just need to finish this and market it as soon as possible.
My previous thirst for knowledge that I had for Software has now been switched to Business. I have a deep passion for writing code but now I want to learn how to sell this game so I am starting small with a basic 2D game.
In future posts I will post up more progress on the game and if anyone is interested I can let some of you guys test out the game on my private secured server.
If you have any advice, comments, concerns I would love to hear it.
I really appreciate the early feedback and thanks for reading!!
-Eric
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