Ryan Gawick Web Development Career

Ryan Gawick was born in Canada, his parents moved to the United States when Ryan was five. The family traveled and lived in several different countries such as France, Malaysia, and Venezuela. When the family returned to the United States they settled in Texas.

Ryan attended Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas for his undergraduate studies. He then went on to Houston Baptist University in Houston, Texas where he earned his MBA. He began his career in a customer service facing role. His next position was with Host Gator a web hosting company. He earned four promotions during the five years he was with the company. He then moved on to work in the oil fields of Texas. Ryan began by driving a tanker truck hauling crude oil then advanced to an operator position at a pipeline terminal in Bay City, Texas. This position last-ed until 2015 when the oil industry entered a sharp downturn.

Ryan then moved to Portland, Oregon and went on to work at Airgas. He appreciated the company but eventually felt stagnant in his position. Ryan decided to go back to school for web development as it used to be one of his hobbies. It was something that he knew he would excel at and would be able to make a long-term career out of it.

Ryan Gawick is currently a freelance web developer. At this moment, he is working on several side projects and continues to build up his portfolio. As always, he is consistently educating and re-educating himself. He utilizes Udemy quite often for his on-going education. He hopes to one day find a permanent position in this field as a project manager, where he can use his creative and technical skills in unison.

What gave you the idea for your Web Development career? How did it start?

The thing that gave me the idea to pursue web development as a career was that I was working at Airgas and was enjoying it overall. But I was thirty-four years old and I felt as though I was not progressing in my career. I was not working in a position that provided growth. I felt stagnated. I went back to the drawing board. Ultimately, I went back to school. I attended the top-rated coding boot camp here in Houston, TX because it looked like something that would allow me to launch a new and exciting career.

What’s your favorite thing about your chosen profession?

My favorite thing with web development is that you get to be creative. You have the ability to create your entire idea from scratch and turn it into a reality. It is a very creative field. You are not just doing basic tasks that you are assigned. There is nothing that is repetitive about it. You are building something that you can say you built on your own.

What keys to being productive can you share with us?

The keys to making myself productive is to trust in the process. Knowing that if you do the right things that success will find you. If you have good habits and you continue to educate yourself then you will keep growing and you will begin to build more impressive things with your abilities. Not only will it be more enjoyable, but you will be more in demand with clients or within your work environment.

Tell us one long-term goal in your career.

I am a junior developer at this point. My goal for right now is to continue to educate myself and build up my skills. I want to become one of the best at what I do. My long-term goal would be to manage a project. Ultimately, I would like to become a project manager. I would like to be managing a group of developers through many different projects. Right now, I just want to keep developing my own skills and good practices until I work my way up.

What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned through the course of your career?

The most valuable lesson I have learned throughout my career is not to take anything for granted. There is a lot of work out there, but no one is going to give it to you. You must work very hard, and there is a lot of competition out there. You have to overcome the competition. It is tough out there and it will never be easy. The lesson is to work hard, keep educating yourself and strive for continuous improvement in all aspects of your life.

What advice would you give to others aspiring to succeed in your field?

I would tell anyone who is aspiring to come into this field, especially if you’re going to go through a boot camp, to make sure that you are not slacking off in any way. Make sure that you are doing every single assignment and every single project. Even if you think it is not important, you still have to do it. I had way too many colleagues that slacked off and didn’t really do anything. They are finding it difficult to find work. There is something called GitHub, it shows all the activities that you did while you were in school or training. It shows all your uploads and projects. A big piece of advice is that you want to make sure that all your GitHub shows that you are staying engaged and continuously creating new content. It has to show that you are doing the assignments. For the students that were finding it hard to find work, if you look at their GitHub, it appears as though they were not doing any assignments at all. Some of them had two or three months between up-loads. What do you think an employer is going to think when he or she views that?

What are your favorite things to do outside of work?

My favorite thing to do in the world is to snowboard. But unfortunately, there aren’t any snow-capped mountains here in Texas. My other hobbies include golfing, fishing, working out, hiking and I also really enjoy traveling.

Name a few influential books you’ve read and/or websites you keep up with that you’d recommend to readers.

I am not huge into reading books, but as far as web content goes, Udemy.com is a great website that has proven to be very valuable. Medium.com and Hackernoon.com also have some great blog articles that will keep you up to date with the latest tech trends. You can find all of these through google searches as well. Stackoverflow.com is another great site. It is a place where you can go with just about any question and other developers will help you solve your problem.

What advice would you give your younger self?

If I were to speak with my younger self today, I would say that it is important to work hard when you’re young, if you don’t it is much harder as an adult. Work hard in school. Get straight “A”s. Go to a good University and take the hardest courses you can take. Push yourself. If you don’t do it when you’re young, you’re going to have to play catch-up later. It will be even tougher. Don’t take the easy way out.

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