I do not have a Computer Science background. I did not tinker with code as a cute, youthful hobby. Before 6 months ago if someone asked me what the Command Line was I would have guessed it had something to do with the military. And yet, here I find myself, a student in the UX Engineering Design & Development dev accelerator at Codefellows, a vocational school for the digital age. I think I’m gonna get my ass kicked.

When I went to college I got an English major because that was my academic happy place. I was good at it without tremendous effort. Since then I’ve worked in tourism and hospitality, emergency medicine, food and beverage, and, finally, a creative agency which turned me on to the world of design. It’s been a wandering path, but it has equipped me with an interesting set of tools with which to solve design problems. A few UI development projects came through our office at my last job and I found the work fascinating. For the first time I was getting paid to solve complex problems that combined my seemingly disparate interests in art, technology, emotion, persuasion, visual design, interaction, psychology and business. I had landed, by chance, in the lap of a discipline I didn’t know existed: UX.

As the end of the world keeps getting postponed technology speeds ever onward into more and more areas of our lives. I grew up with Atari. Now my phone has processing power that would have sent every computer I owned for the first twenty years of my life running, ashamed, tail between it’s obsolete legs. The trend is no surprise: Everyone is using machines for everything. Smarter people than I have seen this coming for a long while, but it dawned on me that if I wanted a rewarding, future-oriented career this could be a great fit. There is a need. The world needs intelligent, trained people to usher us, as a people, responsibly into the technological future. Already in areas such as web browsers, personal computer OS’s and now smartphone OS’s, there has been conflict. Corporations duke it out to dominate their space. As a result many opposed technologies and standards have come and gone, often to the detriment of the user. The tech train isn’t slowing down. Barring total apocalypse there will be a growing role for professionals with the tools and training to create beneficial technological experiences across a multitude of platforms and demographics.

The more I learned about the UX career path the more I came to a singular conclusion: I needed to learn code. There are certainly Usability opportunities outside the realm of digital, but man there are a lot more inside. I was trying to set myself up for a job where I would be part of the future. I didn’t want the future to just happen to me. If you look forward, I think you’ll agree that many of societies greatest advancements over the next 50 years are going to happen in lines of code. So I researched the field and started evaluating job roles, job markets, salaries, portfolios and educational opportunities. There are a heavy concentration of these coding schools in New York and the Bay Area but, at the time of this writing, programs exist in most major American cities. I was accepted to a Masters program at the University of Washington in Human-Computer Interaction and Design at the same time I heard from Codefellows and that was that. I was moving to Seattle.

I began learning to code on my own. You can’t walk into the Codefellows’ Dev Accelerators with zero prior knowledge. Through resources on Lynda.com, Codeschool.com, Codecademy and General Assembly I started soaking up everything I could. I spent about 5 months trying to learn the basics in my spare time, and I’ve done a decent job, but I know that there is an enormous difference betwen sitting alone in a room hitting your head against a wall until something works and having a practicing professional standing over your shoulder telling you exactly why and how you’re fucking up and explaining how to fix it. The road ahead is long and no one has said this is gonna be easy, but I couldn’t be more excited to get my mind blown.