Participant Story: Lian
Lian is one of the participants of our six-month software engineering program! You can support her journey at techtonica.org/donate.
The tech world has been a part of Lian’s life ever since she arrived in San Francisco four years ago. She came here to live with her best friend and figure out her next step, not knowing that just about everyone she’d meet would work for a startup. Lian started out working gig jobs, including as a courier for Postmates, and landed in customer support at Square. But now she wants to do more than just work at the fringes of tech.
“I knew I wanted to be part of the tech world in a meaningful way. So I started looking at coding camps a couple years ago, but they are really expensive,” she said, explaining that she currently lives in a low-income microstudio in SOMA, putting her right in the heart of the San Francisco startup scene. “I specifically wanted to learn code because I like the autonomy of it. If you have an idea, you can run with it. I’d like to be able to speak the language and know if an idea is doable.”
Like many people who flinch at the $25,000 price tag of many coding camps, she dove into the challenging task of self-teaching using free resources.
“It’s learning a whole new language and it’s really hard to teach yourself,” she said, adding that it’s particularly hard to know exactly what to teach yourself when you’re first interested in learning to code. “When you are on your own it’s hard to measure yourself or do any benchmarking. I know that learning with a community will make it a lot easier.”
Lian heard about Techtonica on Facebook, and sees this as her opportunity to overcome her major barriers to becoming an engineer — cost and a supportive learning environment.
“It was good to work with other people during the Techtonica workshop because they were just as stuck as I was,” she said about the collaborative nature of the initial workshops Techtonica hosted to find their candidates.
“I want to personally contribute in a meaningful way, and I think learning to code and create is the way to do that,” she said. “I know it’s a community I want to be a part of.”
If you or your company might be interested in supporting program participants like Lian, please donate at techtonica.org/donate or look at techtonica.org/sponsor.
To read about our other participants, please click on their names below:
