Welcome to the Well Paid Geek Newsletter

Welcome to the Well Paid Geek email newsletter.

If you weren't expecting to have been signed up to this newsletter, feel free to click the unsub link at the bottom! If you were expecting it, read on and I'll introduce myself and point you towards some of the free tech resources I put out, and tell you a little about what to expect on my mailing list.

So I am the Well Paid Geek. No, you don't get my real name. I love myself a bit on internet anonymity.

I first started regularly coding back in my mid teens - that's over 20 years ago now. At that age I'd always been fascinated by computers. They were fairly new back then, and our household didn't get a PC till I was 14. I always seemed to have an affinity for using them, and the idea of controlling them fully by writing code really excited me. At the time the internet wasn't really a thing, no one had a home internet connection. I don't think wifi even existed. This meant I had no idea how to start coding. This changed one day, I can still remember it, when a school friend gave me a CD ROM (remember those?) of pirated software. Amongst the software on the CD was a copy of Turbo Pascal 7 for DOS. If you haven't heard of Pascal, it's a programming language that is rarely used today. I managed to work out how to compile programs from the read me files, and managed to get books on it from the local University library since my Dad taught there. Soon I was compiling my own small programs, and would work late into the night, taping out program code into the flickering command line editor.

I loved learning the syntax.

I loved the abstract problem solving.

I loved creating reusable systems.

At this point I was certain when I was older I wanted to become a computer programmer (that's what they called it back then), I could get paid to do what I found fun and engaging!

Well, my path from there to being the Well Paid software engineer I am today wasn't an easy one, but that's a story for another day perhaps.

I've worked with a number of technologies over my 15 year professional career, but most recently I am a contract front end focused but sort of full stackish JavaScript developer working for a soulless, but well paying, investment bank in central London.

A while back I decided to help the world learn how to code, and make a side income, by producing a mixture of free and paid for content online.

You can find me online in the following places:

Twitter: @WellPaidGeek https://twitter.com/WellPaidGeek
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/wellpaidgeek Some tutorials focusing on JavaScript / React, to be honest don't post regularly
Blog: http://wellpaidgeek.com Tutorials, focusing on JavaScript / React, updated weekly from now on
Dev to: https://dev.to/wellpaidgeek A mirror of all my blog posts
Newsletter: As in what you're reading now. Less tutorials and more musings and motivation on tech / coding and tech careers, sometimes on life in general.

WPG