A Series: Beginnings
Okay, so maybe the title of this post is a little misleading. This isn’t a series of blog posts titled Beginnings, but a single post about many beginnings. The past six months of code school have elicited a series of beginnings.
Beginning to learn a new trade.
Beginning an internship in a new industry.
Beginning to get lost in beautiful (and sometimes not so beautiful) code.
As today marks my official graduation from Epicodus, I look forward to the new beginnings that are ahead of me and honor the ones that had to exist prior to get me to this day.
So, if I were to give those beginnings a moment to speak… what would they say?
I learned a new trade, and I found my happy place. A place where my love for creation, analytics, language, and puzzles intersect to meet me at my desk each day in the face of my Atom editor. As someone who walked in the doors of Epicodus, still recovering the full use of my dominant arm after a recent surgery and not even having the knowledge to confidently navigate around in the terminal… to walking out doors having built an API middleware for a machine learning software and being able to bike to work… Yes! I celebrate this growth and that I learned so much more than a trade, but a whole new way of thinking and problem solving.
I began an internship with RocketML, a startup developing the ‘fastest computational engine for machine learning.’ I jumped into a whole world of new concepts, vocabulary, and application of programming. In all honesty -of the list of internship opportunities organized by Epicodus, this was the one I was most fascinated and intimidated by. I had just tucked web development under my belt and the idea of machine learning seemed outside the scope of my new found experience. I can say now, after the fact of entering the world of RocketML, that I am so happy that my curiosity pushed me towards something that scared me rather than pull me away. My mind has expanded in ways I couldn’t have even expected. My thirst to keep learning is even stronger, and my dreams of the future are dancing with the possibilities of machine learning and AI.
And finally, I got lost in code — in its beauty and success.. and its puzzle and mess. When I say I got lost, I don’t mean literally (although if I think back to my first day of Ember js that wouldn’t be too far off from the truth.) The kind of lost I’m getting at is the kind when something sweeps you off your feet and transports you to a whole realm you didn’t know existed. And when you get there, you take a sigh of relief that you found your place, your people, and your craft. This is a beginning that I don’t think will really ever leave.
So it goes..
Now as someone who is walking into the industry and on the search for jobs…Another beginning has just begun.
And you know what I’ve got to say?
Bring it on!
