As part of Inside Dev’s “Resilience” series, I recently spoke to an Inside Dev reader, Michael, who lost his job at a bank during the financial crisis in 2008. While initially it was tough, he eventually ended up not just surviving but thriving, finding a new career as a better-paid web developer. Here’s his story, and how he managed to bounce back after one of the worst financial crises of our times:
1. Tell me a bit about what happened to you during the 2008 financial crisis.
Sure thing: I lost a job at a bank, where I had been doing a mix of marketing, desktop application programming, some light web development, and IT work (it was a small bank, so many hats!)
The job loss prompted me to update my programming skills, learning Rails, modern PHP frameworks, and catching up with where CSS and JavaScript was going. I did full-time freelancing with those skills for a few years and ended up working for one of my customers, a marketing agency serving an industrial niche, and I’m still doing web development in that field today.
2. How exactly did you update your programming skills?
Michael: I self-taught and primarily used books. At the time, the one that helped me the most was Sam Ruby’s Agile Web Development with Rails. I also watched RailsCasts, a free video series that taught me a lot of little tricks from the presenter’s code editor setup. Making my first applications from scratch sent me back to these resources over and over as I started to learn what exactly I didn’t know yet.
