About Me and the Goal of this Site

My name is Bar Franek. I’m a self-taught programmer.

I didn’t start “learning to code” until my very late 20’s. For most of my life, I stayed on the artistic side of technology. I went to college for 3D animation, then spent years doing graphic and web design for small businesses. I had the limiting belief that programming was meant for people with 5 year Computer Science degrees. So I outsourced that type of work to friends with exactly those degrees.

A few years ago, I really wanted to build an app. So I read books and did a lot of tutorials and video courses. I immersed myself in code for months.

Once I became somewhat competent, I found myself enjoying programming. Writing code to bring an idea to life is just as creative as writing novels or painting pictures. As you’ll see on this site, they have a lot in common.

Fast-forward to today, where I’ve managed to have a fairly successful career in software development. (I realize that I’m skipping some important steps, like how I did it, but that’s genuinely what the rest of this site is about.)

Enough about me. Let’s talk about you.

If you want to get the most fulfillment and reward out of what you do, you have to be intentional about it. People don’t stumble into success. It’s never an accident. You have to become what Cory House calls, an outlier.

The goal of this site is to brain dump all the best self-improvement and self-development stuff I’ve consumed over the years. Especially the stuff that applies to careers in technology.

Most human problems have already been solved by smarter people that came before us.

You’re not the first person to have a problem with learning something difficult. You’re not the first person to feel scattered and unfocused. You’re not the first person to feel underpaid. You’re not the first person to have trouble fighting the muse and never finishing a project.

When you spend enough time doing this (or anything difficult thing), you realize that natural ability has almost nothing to do with success. Anything that someone else has learned, you can learn too.

If you want to get in touch, you can email me at bargard108 [at] gmail