Journey to Code

It has recently come to my attention that I am old. The clues have been there for a while now, but I didn’t fully realize it until making the transition into the tech industry. Again, this should not have been a surprise. The writing has been on the wall, the arthritis in my feet from two decades in kitchens, the lines chiseled on my brow, and the fact that I still don’t understand TikTok, I should have known. However, coming from the restaurant industry where no one is ever young, and no one is old until they retire or die, I had entirely ignored all these telltale signs that I am indeed old.

I am not moaning and groaning about being old.. and I am not that old. But, I am old enough that it shocks people when they hear I learned something entirely new and now have a fulfilling career as a software engineer. People really want to believe that “can’t teach an old dog new tricks” bullsh_t! I’m not going to go all motivational speaker… but seriously, f_ck that! Anyone who truly believes what this old adage is supposed to imply must be miserable.

Let’s get to the point of this post.. How did this “old dog” learn new “tricks”? Well, it was 2020, YouTube obviously. It’s a joke, but there is truth in it. The full truth is this, I grew up around computers. Both of my parents worked from a home office and were very early adopters of technology. I remember when my parent’s replaced their typewriters with IBM PS/2 systems in the late 1980’s. The commands to start up the original King’s Quest from the DOS terminal are still burned in my memory. Due to my parent’s home office, I had access to the internet in my house before it was available at my school. The fact it took me this long to land in tech is a bit surprising when I look back on it.

I had forgotten this until recently, but the first code I ever wrote was a Beavis & Butthead fansite I made in computer class in 1995. This memory faded and in my mind computers and software became tools to do work. Despite my early exposure to PCs as they were coming into existence, software engineering as a career was a far off concept. It would be 21 years before I would follow up my Beavis & Butthead page with my next line of code.

By 2016, I was running a startup. The majority of our retail sales were made via our Shopify store. Our site was initially set up by a designer who did a great job! However, they had left the stock Shopify logo as the Favicon (little icon in the browser tab) for our store. This bugged me, but I am so thankful they left the stock logo, because if they had not, I really don’t know if I would be where I am today. So, I added our brand’s logo as the Favicon and it snowballed from there.

In the super-happy-fun-times of 2020, while the world was seemingly at a standstill and we were all in quarantine. I began studying code outside of the context of my Shopify store. I literally googled “what programming language to learn first?” After reading a bit about it, I decided to start with Python. I found the videos of Qazi from Clever Programmer on YouTube, these were a great start. From there, I moved on to Udemy and purchased a mountain of classes because they were “on sale”. I had no idea what I was buying for the most part, and many lessons sit untouched. Those that I have completed get my full-endorsement: Python Programming Masterclass by Tim Buchalka, 100 Days of Code - The Complete Python Pro Bootcamp by Dr. Angela Yu, and Build Responsive Real World Websites with HTML5 and CSS3 by Jonas Schmedtmann. These were all great, but I felt I needed structure and I needed insight into the tech industry. I decided I was going to enroll in a coding bootcamp.

That decision came pretty easy. Selecting which program I wanted to attend, that was a lot more difficult. There are so many programs, focusing on different tech stacks, ideologies and varying themed lesson plans (so much ninja stuff)... Based on my own research and input from a couple friends I have in the industry, I had narrowed it down to two programs. App Academy’s Software Engineering Program or General Assembly’s Software Engineering Immersive. Ultimately I decided on General Assembly’s JavaScript and MERN stack heavy curriculum over App Academy which seemed to lean more towards Ruby on Rails. Both seemed like great programs, but I could only choose one. Luckily, General Assembly turned out to be one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life! From there, the pieces began to fall into place and the gateway to the tech industry had opened… I got the job.