MY story may sound a bit unusual at first glance. I am in fact an instructor giving courses on academic writing and reading comprehension skills at a university. However, since 2019, I have simultaneously been developing frontend projects and dealing with UI design through web 2.0 technologies. That’s right. I’ve got two jobs that are really different from each other and naturally, I am pretty busy, but I don’t feel overwhelmed. Why is that? Well, I guess the reason is that I don’t feel like working as I am in a complete flow state when I am in the process of creating anything from scratch and learning something new along the way. Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi , one of the most eminent psychologists of this era depicts the state of flow as ‘losing yourself in an activity as a result of the extreme pleasure it creates in the brain’. This is precisely what has happened to me. Don’t get me wrong. I love teaching, too. Nevertheless, without even realising, this new activity which I initially considered to be a mere hobby has turned into a real passion on my side. The thing is I’ve always been fascinated by computers and the potential of AI products has never ceased to excite me, but I’ve never thought that this fascination would help me jumpstart my 2nd career in the tech world.

Let me rewind a bit. It all started with an inspirational YouTube video by Robin MacPherson, a diligent polyglot. In that video, he was trying to articulate his own journey as to how he first ended up being homeless due to several unfortunate incidents and then eventually turning into a self-taught software developer with his own app. I remember being mesmerised by this spectacular story and I said to myself: “ Why not? I’ve always had a thing for technology. Perhaps, I should give ‘coding’ a go. There is no harm in trying.”

Years ago, it was almost impossible to reach quality resources and as such real knowledge instantaneously. How about self-taught people working in sophisticated areas with intricate projects requiring higher-order thinking skills? Free of charge training /education programs? No way! Those were also out of question back then. Since accessing the relevant materials was hard and costly, we didn’t use to come across such versatile souls handling their own educational needs. In today’s world, however, this is no longer the case. That’s what I — once again — realised through the above-mentioned video. Remember once-famous commercial slogan; ‘Impossible is Nothing!’’? Well, this is especially true with all these mind-blowing technological gadgets, handy software programs, their accessibility and brand new cognitive learning methods we are surrounded today. I feel like we — homo sapiens /modern human beings — are on the verge of evolving into an upgraded version. In accordance with these developments, perhaps, schools — in the traditional sense — will be obsolete in the near future. Despite its diabolical outcomes, even the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation, IBM report suggests. In brief, everything is changing at an exponential pace.