My Journey to Becoming a Developer.
Let me tell you a story.
When I was very young, my dad was learning BASIC. I was five, maybe six, years old. He asked my sisters and I to each come up with a game for him to write. He wrote a game where you had to guess letters for one sister, another equally simple game for the other — I don’t remember what the other was — and on my request, he wrote tic tac toe.
I’m not actually sure how long it took to write, but I remember it taking FOREVER — I am now very thankful I have resources like the entire internet at my fingertips. Eventually, after eons of pestering — I was a very persistent child — it was finally done.
The game was played on the command line — remember those days when you turned on your computer you actually had to tell it to go to either the Windows 95 or DOS interface? — though I’m sure my dad set it up so I couldn’t break anything. It asked me for my name, and greeted me. It then asked me for which position I wanted to play, 1 through 9. My space was filled with an ‘X’ and it then responded with an ‘O’ in a blank square. After the game was done it told me who won and asked if I wanted to play again.
It was at a very young age I knew that computer programming was a thing that turned letters and numbers into games. After my first cross country adventure with my family, when I was eleven, I went to a book fair with my mother and found a web development book. It taught me how to build sites with HTML and CSS. I wrote directly in Notepad, because I didn’t really have a better idea, and my Dad probably didn’t want me to downloading some strange text editor off the internet.
The site I made was a perfuse shade of purple, that stretched from one side of the screen to the other. This was a time of course when many sites lacked margins — some sites still do. I added scanned pictures from our trip to Mount Rushmore and the Grand Canyon. I don’t remember what I wrote about. I even tried to set it up with a comment form, and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting the responses from it. My father had to explain to me that I wasn’t telling it to go anywhere. So I added a <mailto:stefanefanie@comcast.net> to try to solve the issue, but it wasn’t until I started studying programming again recently I finally realized he meant it needed to be sent to a database that I did not have, or at the very least I needed to set up some sort of event handling.
At the time I didn’t recognize that the “file:///Documents…” was a directory on my computer instead of a url, and I tried to share the website with a few friends, and pass it between computers. I think we might have figured out a way to host it on a Comcast page, but I quickly lost the complicated URL that was a random key of numbers and letters.
The next year, I was part of a group in middle school for fellow over-achievers. We met once a week, and we had modules that we go through and learn from. After my summer of writing my first website, I was very excited to find a module about web development. I started it, but quickly lost interest because it was building a site on some version of WordPress, and I lacked the gumption to take charge of my learning and change the curriculum to be more programming oriented, so I started learning Sign Language instead.
Throughout middle school and early high school I took apart and examined a couple of the many computers in my parent’s basement; they probably still have that Windows 95 processor dusty somewhere. I looked at the computer chips, and toyed around with UTF8 and learned some binary. I pretended to build meaningful things with the chips, but it was all just playing. I didn’t go get books from the library to figure out what any of it really meant. I was mostly paging at my dad’s old textbooks, and rather than actually retaining the information, I stayed in the childlike state of fascination without letting the knowledge sink in.
When applying for schools, I applied as an Engineer to most places, and got in most places. But at the time I wasn’t set on being an engineer. Lord knows why not. I told myself and everyone else that I applied to be an engineer because it was harder to get into the engineering schools if you decide later on that you want to be an engineer, and I figured I might as well get in now, and get out later. And, after almost failing multivariable calculus my first semester and having a GPA less than 3.0, I quit. I got my degree in environmental science and archaeology instead. Along the way I took a couple engineering courses about dams, and I learned a little GIS and MatLab along the way, but I had quit engineering, and never took a computer science class. People kept telling me it was boring, and my mistake was I believed them.
A year and a half after graduating, I started toying around with programming languages again. I’m not sure what triggered it, except that I was trying to make more money than I was as a triathlon coach and a part time bike salesman, so I figured I should gain another skill. I started an Intro to Python class on Coursera, but as it goes with most free online courses, I didn’t finish. I checked out rails for zombies, and played with codecademy’s tools. It was all very surface level. Eventually I decided I wanted to take a computer science class at a local community college, this was also while toying the idea of getting a masters in Urban Planning, or International Development, or even going back to Culinary School. I have a lot of interests see. What finally made me take the plunge was that I wanted to go to HubSpot’s Inbound conference, and if you could prove you were a student, you could get in for $199, rather than somewhere around $2000, so on the last day to sign up, I started a Intro to Computer Science course, with an emphasis on Java.
After a very short period of time, I quickly rediscovered what I had discovered nearly two decades prior, programming was amazing. I could tell a little pixelated robot on my screen to do things that it didn’t know how to do until I wrote it down. I was one of the few people in the class taking it for sport, rather than working towards an associates degree, and most days I also happened to be the only girl in the room. But none of that mattered. What mattered was after 20 years of intermittent play, I had finally found what I was good at.
So, despite the warnings from my Computer Science professor, I applied for and got into Dev Bootcamp. And after several thousand hours in and out of the program, and I have landed my first backend developer job as an intern for a small startup. Twenty years after my dad first introduced me to programming, fifteen years after my mom bought my first development book, I am come full circle and once again I am playing in the command line, with the iconic black background and blinking green cursor.
