Introduce Yourself - SharePoint Developer

I've already done an #introduceyourself where I detailed the farm I live on, the homesteading and self-sufficiency I do, however, I want to do another one introducing myself as a SharePoint Developer.

I originally got my degree in horses, but when I had maxed out my earnings early on, and was just scraping by working 16 hour days I decided I needed a change of pace. It seemed like if you didn't own the farm, you never made any of the money the farm brought it.

I took a series of temp jobs and was pleasantly surprised when I turned out to be a quick learner and easily impressed every boss I worked for with my work ethic. Looks like the years at the barn paid off.

I landed a temp job doing strict data entry for a Fortune 500 company. The data entry was in SharePoint, and I really enjoyed learning about the tool and working in it. I went to the manager and said, "you should hire me." So he did. (Ok - it wasn't THAT easy. I had to do a temp-perm position for a few months, but it really seemed that easy in hind-sight).

Unfortunately, he hired me in a SharePoint support role...but I had only had a few weeks of experience USING the tool, not supporting it! And there was zero training available. I was told to look at our support tickets, and google the problem. Call the users and ask for details. If I still couldn't figure it out, go to the more experienced folks and ask them.

It was trial by fire. And the first few months were insanely stressful. But I started getting the hang of it. And within 6 months I was confident with the tool, confident in my role, and closing out tickets in record time.

A few years later I'm working at a different Fortune 500 company as a SharePoint developer. Again - I find myself in a trial by fire. I know SharePoint inside and out, but I'm still teaching myself how to code. I've gone through a number of the online trainers available, but my job involves reverse engineering someone else's code, figuring out why it's broken, if it needs to be as customized as it is, and basically floundering until I stumble upon something or decide it's better to rebuild from scratch.

The reason behind this story, however, is to set the stage for what I want to do with Steemit.

I have a number of people come to me complaining about their jobs. They're under paid, over worked, under appreciated. My immediate answer is to learn SharePoint! I get emails and phone calls on a daily basis asking for interviews for SharePoint positions. The pay is ridiculous, and it's an extremely rewarding career! Plus SharePoint is NOT that hard to learn.

So I want to start a SharePoint series on Steemit that I can point them to, and make it available to anyone else who is interested in learning about SharePoint.

I envision a two part series: one where I'll walk through trainings and explanations in a SP 101 format, and another where I'll detail specific work examples and how I solved them.

If you have any SharePoint questions, or want to learn about anything specifically, please comment and let me know! I'd be happy to write something up for you!