Changing profession, Jobs and impact on my life

So, for 13 years now I have been working as a front-end developer and I love it.

Before that I worked in a game store and I enjoyed it. I sold games to people, gave advice and for a long time it didn't feel as a job but as a really cool hobby I got paid for. I met some nice people with the same interests, I made money and I had benefits such like cheaper games, going to conferences, loaning games, etc.

But what I see now is that I forgot to look forward at that time. After a couple of years my working days felt repetitive and they didn't feel useful. My managers and I didn't set goals and so there wasn't progression in my professional life. I worked there but my personal life and career weren't in sync. At some point I started working on the company website and I really liked it. I tried to spend more and more time on it and created something nice and profitable for the company. It was then that I set some goals:

• I wanted to be a web developer.
• I wanted to go back to school, college education.

I quit my game store job and applied on a lot of web developer jobs. One company, Parade Technologies, at the time invited me and offered me a job, based on my game store website work. I had no other references so I was really lucky. After a couple of months I suggested to follow a Software Engineering course (4 days a week in the evening, 4 years). My preference was mainly design, UX & front-end and software engineering is a different direction but it felt good to have this fundamental knowledge and I hoped to have more understanding of programming in general.

After three years my contract wasn't renewed (In the Netherlands you can get two temporary contracts but the third has to be indefinite, and that's a risk for a lot of companies) I was still following my SE course and had more experience by now. I found a new job as front-end developer in a week. There I worked for 9 years and I learned a lot.

That brought me to today, my current Job at Valtech Netherlands. I doubted a lot if I had to change companies but something was telling me that I had to do this so I could learn new things and meet new people. And it was the right choice, I learned so much in just 9 months.

What I am trying to say is this: set goals for yourself and keep challenging yourself. That way you can feel great and expand your knowlegde. Sometimes this will mean the you have to get out of your comfort zone but it will be worth it...