The Real Story about Learning to Code in your 30s

Lindsey Maddox
Jul 21, 2017 · 7 min read

If you’re looking for a shiny, happy story about becoming a software developer, this isn’t it.

I quit my job as an analytics manager at a start-up in the fall of 2014. I didn’t start my next full-time job — and first dev role — until May 2017. This story is about that journey — and all the interruptions and stumbling blocks I experienced over those years.

When I started out, I only vaguely knew of bootcamps and figured I could learn programming on my own without too much difficulty. I thought I’d take 6M learning to code and then find another job. I was way off.

Things started off well. I solved some Ruby challenges my brother and others had ‘assigned’ me, learned Rails, and wrote a few Rails programs end-to-end. The designs were terrible — both on the site and in my application — but I was able to build out the projects a little with things like (data-powered) summaries and recommendations.

By that point, I was in the 5–6M range of unemployment and a little lost on what to do. I could have maybe looked for my first dev job, but my husband and I were moving in a few months. It seemed strange to just keep building more of the same projects. I picked up a little freelance work and planned to revisit programming after a short break.

Then I got pregnant. I did not have much nausea, but I was exhausted. With doctor’s appointments, apartment research, and moving prep, I did not have the energy to dedicate to programming. I took several months off and honestly didn’t think about coding much during that time.

Then, one day after a freelance project had wrapped, I took a look at a program my brother had told me about, freeCodeCamp. After flying through the introductory concepts, I was hooked. The program was broken up into stages — each stage including algorithm challenges and projects. They were the perfect size for the time I had available — offering enough resistance to make finishing them feel rewarding but not so difficult that they added stress to an already nerve-racking time.

With a pretty consistent effort of a few hours a day, I completed almost all of the Front End Development program in about 2.5M. I finished my next-to-last project, Tic Tac Toe, two weeks before my due date and only had one project and algorithm left to get my certificate. As much as I wanted to hit that milestone before the baby was born, the exigencies of late pregnancy just wouldn’t allow it.

Then, five days late, the baby came. My delusions of working on programming during quiet time (ha!) or nap time were quickly squashed. I spent the first 6 weeks or so of my daughter’s life in a complete fog. Sleep deprivation wasn’t the only thing plaguing me–I was also trying to keep up with the cycle of feeding, changing, and 3–5 hours of near constant crying in the late afternoon and evening. I felt like a completely different person — and not in a good way. I felt like I was living someone else’s life.

My daughter started sleeping through the night around 3 months, and we got into a manageable rhythm. I started going out on my own and doing things I enjoy more. By regaining some semblance of my identity, I felt a little more in control of my situation. And I knew I needed to make strides toward changing it.

Early one Saturday morning when my daughter was about 4 months old, I decided to forego my coffee run and take a crack at the last FCC algorithm again. I was sitting in the community room of my apartment building just staring at my computer as I flailed with different approaches to the problem. I couldn’t hold the whole thread of the problem in my mind; every time I tried to regroup, it felt like I was missing a different piece of the puzzle. I realized I was still extremely tired, and my brain simply wasn’t equipped to attempt a problem of that complexity.

I was so focused on my goal of getting back to work that I didn’t give myself permission to have any down time. I was honestly a little terrified that if I didn’t get out soon, I never would. But after this experience, I knew I wasn’t at a place where my efforts would really be effective. So, I cut myself some slack. I didn’t loop back around to programming until August — when my daughter was 5.5 months and taking naps longer than 40 minutes at a time.

Every day, I’d wake up around 6 — and she’d wake up at 7. We’d play until about 9 or so, at which point she’d go down for a long nap. After doing some chores, I’d sit down at my computer. I usually had about an hour — maybe an hour and fifteen minutes — before she’d wake up. Once I started this regimen, I quickly cranked out the Simon game and cleaned up my old projects before officially completing the Front End program.

After dabbling in JavaScript background technologies, I had a great idea for jumping back into Rails — a meal planning application. This was my biggest project to date. Because it was something I actually used myself, I had a constant supply of extensions and features to add. I inevitably ran into snags integrating my ideas into the app. But hour-by-hour and hacking meetup at a time, I built out MealPlanner enough that I was proud to include it in my portfolio.

Around the same time, I’d started exploring different day care options and setting up appointments to visit them. We assumed it would take at least another 6 months (after my daughter’s first birthday) to get a spot. My husband happened to call his corporate day care at the right time, though, because they had a rare infant spot open up that had to be claimed the next day. Despite not having done any job searching yet, we took the spot.

I was very nervous about the transition and looking for work, but still excited at the possibility. Unfortunately, the transition was pretty stilted.

Right before she began day care, I came down with the flu. Soon after, my husband got sick too. After a few days in day care, my daughter spent the entire Thanksgiving break sick. And Kept.Getting.Sick. I’m not sure she attended more than 50% of scheduled days until January. Needless to say, I didn’t get a whole lot done during this time period.

I came back from the holidays, committed to my job search and exploring more options. I finally got responses from companies. I went on some interviews, did some take home exercises, worked on my resumes, and wrote a lot of intro emails. When I got rejected after interviews and take-homes, it was confusing and demoralizing. It was unclear why I was rejected, so I didn’t know how to improve or target my search better. I had my first in-person interview, which was positive, but didn’t pan out.

Then it was fairly quiet for nearly two months. I continued to plug through the freecodecamp react/data visualization program I’d been working on. Hopefully, the more I learned, the wider my options would be.

Despite my commitment to keep working, I was getting pretty worried. I had already been applying to analyst jobs — which I was more than qualified for and hadn’t heard anything. Our savings were dwindling. Also, it felt really weird having my daughter in day care for months when I wasn’t actually ‘working’. As much as I thought I’d never feel guilty for being a mom that did something for herself, I kind of did.

Then, all of the sudden, something clicked. I told my brother “I knew I was going to land somewhere”. I started acknowledging my long journey and foregrounding my absence from the workforce — along with the big, red “baby” flag. I built a website where I showed off my work. And I pushed through an end-to-end Javascript application that integrated react, d3, front-end routing, a Mongo database, and authentication.

As things go, this is when I started getting more in-person interviews. One of them resulted in my first programming job, which I started after an almost 6 month search and 2.5 years after I began learning Ruby.

I’ve had so many interruptions in my coding journey that I find it impossible to answer the “how long have you been programming” question. Despite seeming like an innocuous question, it dredges up a lot of shame and frustration surrounding the length of my journey. Maybe if I had done things differently, things would have been easier. Maybe. Who knows. I do know it’s important to be kind to myself. And I try to remember that when I start doubting my decisions or feeling behind.

Nevertheless, there is one good reason to look back and that’s to give thanks to those that helped me make it here. I could have never gotten to this point without my husband who was incredibly supportive about my taking up weekends and nights to go to meetups or work on programming and who saved me from drowning as a stay-at-home-mom. And my brother who initially encouraged me to pursue programming and never doubted that I would eventually find a job as a software developer.

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