Why I left a big, prestigious law firm to become an account specialist at a startup

I spent over ten years as a highly paid (and very comfortable) patent prosecution paralegal at three different big-name, prestigious law firms in California. Then seven months ago, I made the decision to call it quits. This left many of my friends scratching their heads.

Well, the story goes, I was filing a lot of patent applications for high-tech companies in the Bay Area. Most of these revolved around software and algorithms.

As I was hunting down documents to be filed with patent applications, I would often wonder: why in the world are law firms, even here in Silicon Valley of all places, still using physical files? How come patent paralegals are doing the same mundane manual work over and over again?

And the more I thought about this, the more convinced I became that we could automate most of the repetitive procedures that we were doing daily.

Driven by my hunch that things could be done better, I embarked on a journey into automation. I soon found myself down the rabbit hole of coding.

Embarking on my coding journey

As any aspiring programmer knows, learning to code is hard in the beginning. But I made it my business to learn anything and everything that would help me to become more efficient at my job.

I went to University of California, Irvine, as an undergrad student, which is known to have a good computer science curriculum. But I did not dare to take computer classes. I thought only guys who are good in math took CS as a major.

Actually, I did take one class, and found it to be remarkably difficult. But that was a long time ago. At that time, there was no Google (I know, I’m dating myself here). Most of these wonderful free online coding resources we all use today didn’t exist then, either.

One of my positive traits is that when I set a goal, I usually announce it to the world, and don’t get discouraged easily. I’ve found that, by discussing my goals with friends, fairy godmothers and godfathers of the world sometimes appear to offer sage advice based on their own experience.

I started telling my friends that I was considering enrolling in programming classes on Udemy or Udacity and they, who are software engineers at Stanford and Google, told me: “No, don’t spend any money. There are a lot of good, free resources online these days.”

A few weeks later, I gathered up my laptop, goals, and newly found courage, and set up camp in a local coffee shop. I typed into Google “free coding classes.” Like magic, freeCodeCamp appeared in front of my eyes!

I was immediately entranced by the rich forest green of the UI, and smooth and intuitive UX. Before I even realized it, I had begun hands-on exercises of CSS in a few clicks.

Like many of you, I am a very hands-on person, and if I don’t do something on my own, I cannot be sure I mastered a concept. Quincy Larson, the founder of freeCodeCamp, recommends using other resources to learn more deeply about coding concepts. But as a newbie, it was a very exciting first step, because I didn’t have to spend hundreds of hours of reading or watching videos before even starting programming. I was able to immediately experience what it feels like to code.

That’s when I realized I had found the right tool to learn coding. An added bonus was that I could link my freeCodeCamp profile to my LinkedIn profile and announce to the world that I was studying software engineering. To tell you truth, if they didn’t have this feature, I wouldn’t have dared to add “currently studying software engineering” to my profile.

Another great feature about freeCodeCamp is that when you’re stuck on an exercise, you can go to their “help” chatroom on Gitter. There you’ll invariably find fellow learners chatting with each other. You can get answers to your questions or help others. You can even give people who help you “Brownie Points” afterwards by thanking them.

And that’s how I embarked on my coding and UX/UI design journey. This is exciting for me because I used to draw a lot when I was younger, but I didn’t pursue a design career because I thought design was just making things prettier. But now I know that a good design is problem solving. Especially now, thanks to the advancement of microchip technology and internet, UX/UI design is essential to startups and high-tech companies because it helps them to become category kings in their fields and industries.

Getting my first job in tech

Since then, I’ve gotten a great job as an account/operations manager here in Silicon Valley, California. I work at ClearAccessIP, a Software-as-a-Service Artificial Intelligence startup, which provides a machine learning-powered patent analytics platform.

This career transition happened within just six months of learning how to code with freeCodeCamp. And as soon as I joined their team, they gave me additional training in use my terminal, text editor, Git and GitHub to the fullest. I am infinitely grateful for this, and I feel so powerful with these tools!

So here’s my journey in roughly-estimated numbers:

• Total duration learning: less than 6 months
• Total hours: ~300
• Total exercises completed: 269+
• Total computer science courses watched: ~5

Sharing my love of coding with other newbies around my community

I am currently a chancellor and local leader at freeCodeCamp in Santa Clara. We are growing every week! We have awesome self-taught software engineers from Lllip.io that come to our study group every Saturday to teach us web development, algorithms, white boarding, contribute to open source project and job placement. Thank you Llip.io!

Below is our local group’s Facebook event page that I designed using Canva and freeCodeCamp’s open source logo:

I found a side project via Meetup.com few months ago and we are currently building a Twitter-translate bot in Python with awesome 14 lady tech gems. I am learning so much about APIs, JSON, database, code reviews, and debugging. Please connect with me, if you would like to join our team for the next Python project!

I am also helping a non-profit organization to upgrade their UI/UX, using wire framing with Balsamiq. Balsamiq is a quick, easy to use, and essential UI wire framing tool for lean startups and high-tech companies.

As you can see, I’m having the best time of my life. And I encourage you to do the same. I always say, “If I can do it, ANYBODY can do it!”

Thank you for reading my coding journey’s story. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and Facebook, and follow me on Twitter.

Happy coding!

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