One Cheat Code for a New Life
Honestly, if you told me five years ago I would be on a fast track to becoming a software engineer, I would have laughed in your face. Not because I was happy with the trajectory of my life, or my career… Could you even call it a career? I managed to get into office work after clawing my way out of the Service industry, and still wasn’t happy, satisfied, or fulfilled by the work I was contributing. Life started to feel a bit dull, and I was settling into a routine that I truly despised: take whatever job I can get, hold, and stay in. After all, I don’t have a degree (after I dropped out of college twice, ouch), and I “can’t be picky in this job market”.
The pandemic hit everyone like a ton of bricks. When I was ultimately laid off, I felt a cocktail of emotions, the main one being loss. Loss of a job, loss of income, and more importantly, a loss of direction. I was so unsure of where to go, where to turn, what company to apply to. I couldn’t take a pay cut, but I was very self-aware I had no skills to give me leverage over a competitor with a degree. I had no skills outside Microsoft Excel at all. This scared me, deeply. It felt too late to go back to school (again), but I knew the only way to get myself into a desirable position was to learn something. I knew I had to do something, and it took a bit of a deep dive into myself to find out what I wanted, something I had not taken the time to ask myself before.
Getting into code seemed too easy. Sometimes, it feels like the Internet and I have grown up together. From the early 90’s to now, there has been a lot of character development between the two of us, but computers still felt oddly like a stranger. I was fascinated by the people who could talk to computers and have a deeper level of understanding than I did or that most people who use computers do. Luckily, I have close family influences that also showed me the benefits of working in Tech — my uncle, who is a CIO and a very close family friend, who is a Vice President of IBM. They both work in Tech — both of them extremely successful and knowledgeable at their craft, and I want to actively chase that success.
I started teaching myself JavaScript, poorly. As I progressed, I knew that this was going to be a challenge — while I’ve always considered myself smart, this was a whole language that was slowly proving to be unforgiving, and I was going in blind. Every single syntax error that popped up on my screen felt like a blow in the beginning. When I finally felt like I couldn’t teach myself anymore, I applied to Flatiron for their software engineering course, which was an exciting but terrifying step. What if I’m not good enough? What if I can’t settle into this industry like my family? Worse, what if I disappoint my family trying to do this and failing? So many possibilities, positive and negative, invaded my thoughts 24/7 after I applied, and occasionally still try to sneak up.
About a week and a half into the curriculum, I have a new sense of hope. That sounds cheesy, but for every moment I pull out my hair in frustration, I have a moment of progress, which is something that I have been lacking in my life. It has been, and will continue to be, a hard journey of learning. My instructor and technical coaches like to remind the class that if we aren’t failing, we are not really learning, and this is a very valuable lesson I am applying to life outside of code, outside the world of development. So far, I’ve learned about functions, iterating arrays, the DOM and how to manipulate it, and it’s just the beginning of the road, but I am willing, eager, and excited to learn more than ever.
If someone asked me 5 years ago if I thought I would enroll myself into a software engineering bootcamp and pass my first coding challenge on the very first try, I would have just had to laugh at them, but life is funny in an ironic way like that.
Adriana ♡
