Angela Maugey: A Coding Black Female
Angela has been a member of Coding Black Females since 2018, regularly attending sessions and inspiring others. Here she writes about her journey from starting her degree in Medicine to becoming a software developer.
Author: Angela Maugey
Leaving home
Some people know exactly what they want to do after finishing school. College for Further Education, apprenticeship, university, start working. Not me though, before I even finished my A Levels I’d already changed my mind on the course I wanted to do at university. I changed from Medicine to Biomedical Science after realising how squeamish I was. If I’m honest I was only going to uni at all because I had the grades and it gave me a chance to move away from home.
I went to uni in London, far away from my family home, and was excited to move out of the small town I was from. Two years in, I had to go home for the summer due to family illness. I went home in the summer holidays but when I came back, I wasn’t allowed to stay on the course (my uni had been pretty unhelpful in getting me back on board). I had to leave the course and find a job, and do it quickly. I was in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, with no way of paying my rent now that I wasn’t getting a bursary and student loan.
Cake life
I’d always loved cooking and there’s a pretty low barrier into getting into catering so I decided to do a part-time Patisserie and Cake Decoration course first. Before the course finished I found a job in a local German bakery. Thrown in at the deep end I was made to work with a group of 6 German bakers with years of experience. I was told that if I could “handle myself” working with them for 6 months I would be able to work on pastry. It was hard work, working on bread is a physical job, and I was working with a group of men who all had their own ideas on the right way to work. I had to assert more than once that I wasn’t going to be talked down to. I lasted those first 6 months and so went on to the pastry section to do the daily production of pastries, scones and more for 5 star hotels in London.
That was the beginning of my 8 year career in catering. That first job taught me that there weren’t many women doing this job, but subsequently I learnt that as well as women there weren’t many Black men or women doing this job. I was looking around and not seeing anyone like me, in every kitchen that I worked in. I worked with many different nationalities and loved it but what I was being shown was that there were no people like me in high up places in the kitchen.
I worked my way up and eventually managed to get a job as a head of production of a startup bakery. I was running the kitchen, working nights and crazy hours every shift. Even with being at the top, I wasn’t getting the respect I thought I would get, and the owners were not giving me the wages that they were giving the previous head of production. I had one member of staff who threatened me calling me a “girl” and telling me to “watch how I talk to him because I’m a man”. This was the last straw for me, I spoke to the owners who called it “banter” and I realised that I had to leave the kitchen. I couldn’t continue with no support further up and the night hours were really starting to get to me as well as doing such a physically demanding job for 14 hours a shift.
Something different
The first job I could get out of the kitchen was working in a medium secure mental health hospital, teaching service users how to cook. By this point I was in a relationship with my now wife, who was using the Python programming language whilst doing her PhD. She asked for a Raspberry Pi one year for her birthday and sparked my interest when she was programming it to perform light displays. She told me that if I was interested in learning to code there were plenty of online resources to get me started. And so that’s how I got started, I bought myself a course on Udemy for the basics of web development and got stuck in on weekends and after work.
I had really only seen it as a hobby, but I found that more and more of those off work hours were being filled up with me coding and soon the course that I had wasn’t enough and I started reading more and more tutorials and tinkering on other personal projects. I started to think seriously about whether I could do this as a career. I felt like being self taught was going to take me too long and I needed an immersive course to get into it. Uni had burnt me from my first experience so I looked into bootcamps in London. I did A LOT of research and found there was only one free bootcamp course in London, but I managed to find a couple who had funding for minority groups to get into coding.
Career change
When I applied for General Assembly (GA), I asked them about the Opportunity Fund that was advertised on their website. Granted they are a world wide group, but the UK branch had no idea what it was. It took a few forms and phone calls back and forth and then a final in person interview to get me a place on the immersive web development course.
This was probably the scariest career decision I’ve ever had to make. I needed to leave my job to do a 10 week course and hopefully I was going to get a job at the end of it, but there were no guarantees. I went for it and spent 10 hard weeks learning multiple frontend and backend languages. Over the time of the course I learnt basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, Angular and Node.js whilst completing a short project in each. I came out of that course with several small projects, a portfolio and loads of help from the recruitment team to build a new CV.
After the course GA organised a “Meet & Hire” session to get some interview practise. We were told to set up a table to showcase ourselves and our projects, and potential employers would be invited and come to chat with us giving us a chance to have further interviews if anyone was interested. We were also told not to get our hopes up as it was just a practise experience and mainly a chance for a bit of networking. However, I actually did manage to get a further interview at a startup called OnCare, which turned into my first job in tech.
After GA
I now work as a full stack software engineer at OnCare. I get to work on projects across the whole code base and have learnt way more on the job. I’m continuing to learn on the job and actually use Django with Python that are languages that I didn’t even learn in my web development course. It’s sparked my passion for a job again and I love the amount of resources there are out there to just be able to learn a new language or framework.
There obviously are still issues with diversity in tech, my own team is small but I am the only woman and beyond that POC member of the team. However, unlike when I was in catering, I have a group of women to gain support from in the Coding Black Females group which gives me a chance to meet other women who are in or interested in tech. As a group we learn and work on projects together as well as being there as a support group for each other. I’m hoping to see the group expand as more women see this as a potential career.
Get in touch
You can find Angela on LinkedIn
Or check out her GitHub
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