Career transition - from Finance to Developer at age of 39

This is an interesting story. I used to be a finance professional, qualified management accountant in the local industrial zone. But, as I got into programming and deepened my knowledge, I started gaining some traction and started liking it more and more. I decided to quit the world of deadlines, stress and audits and to switch to something more creative.

The transition took approximately 12-16 month of parallel time:
- I was working full-time
- in the meantime I spent weekly 2-4 hours to study C#, SQL or work on the .NET project (internal recharge system)
- and thinking about when to make the transition.

The nice part about the learning process was:

• already familiar with some programming, like Access DB, VBA, Excel, some php&mysql
• familiar with tabular data and databases + SQL (I used to write some queries in my previous workplace, obtaining some data from the company ERP)
• I always enjoyed learning, and could focus very well

The hard part:

• the learning curve for C#, WPF, MVVM and Dapper ORM was steep. It took 6-10 months to show some results
• I became tired after 1 year, working paralelly on the project besides my day job
• frustration after 1 year, having seen the results, and not knowing what's the best thing to do: to quit or to do it paralelly for some time
• became really tired at the end of 2018 by working parallel. I decided that early 2019 I need to quit and go full time into programming.