My Life and Journey to dij
dij has sprouted out of my lifelong career in technology. In my childhood, I went from being enamored with video games and vowing to start a game production company, to becoming the family IT guy. In high school, I finally learned how to make game with intermediate software Multimedia Fusion Developer 2 at summer camp and solidified my desire to create. I chased my passion by going to college at Savannah College of Art and Design to major in Interactive Design and Game Development with a Business minor; switching to Tennessee State University (TSU) for an Interdisciplinary Studies with Computer Science and Art concentrations to seek a more technical background.
In the midst of that, I worked as a campus IT Technician at TSU and spent summers as a camp instructor and taught teenagers level design and the basics of Unreal Engine 3 and Unreal Development Kit, Game Creation with Multimedia Fusion, and programming (concepts) with Java and Scratch. Working heavily with other students to tutor lower classmen in Computer Science, heading Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Robotics, and Game Club events and e-board, I kept myself busy and involved with the engineering community while I was an undergrad at TSU.
I started working as a .NET Developer in the middle of 2014 and completed my last few credits for my degree along with my first year as a “legit” member of the workforce! I “made it” so to speak, and was excited to be able to grow and help a team while working on real technology. I hit the ground running and was maintaining and updating a large enterprise application used by the US Army. I soon grew to be a great contributor to them, helping improve the UI of a handful of the application my team was supporting, and shared wisdom in the Microsoft ways of git, Visual Studio 2013, and ASP.NET MVC.
In the midst of all of this growth in my career, I’ve been growing personally throughout 2015: I went through the hopelessness of feeling trapped in a job; the pain of realizing that even those who claim to love you, don’t know what’s best for you or even HOW to love you; the death of my grandfather; experienced homesickness for the FIRST time; and the evils of cold in
MICHIGAN (@ 2:18);
On the POSITIVE spectrum, I completed a Tough Mudder and found (and maybe lost a few times) myself and some of my limits and drive to live out my passions in life instead of complaining and waiting for others to do things for me or help me out along the way.
Now, I’m forging my path ahead and designing my life to be more in line with who I am and what I need. My life so far has been learning, striving, and succeeding along a path that both burdens my spirit and actively pushes me towards mediocrity and poverty. Poverty in quality of life is not what I want, I refuse to work a job I hate in a place that isn’t my home with people that don’t really love or care for me. A conventional career path and life choices aren’t worth anything to me if I’m not in agreement with how I got there.
I won’t settle for less than what I want, honestly, it’s not that much. A place to live, money to afford that and food. Life isn’t that expensive and I won’t be a pawn in the system if I have a say in the direction for my life.
Personal stories may continue to flow here periodically, so stay tuned for new turns and corners in the life of DJ.
Likewise,
Continue on my journey of “New Year, New dij” over at my work blog: dij Please
