Initial Commit

I was your typical completely insufferable high school kid – the one who had everything completely figured out, seemed to have it all together, was accepted to a great school, had their life planned out to the minute after graduation- you know the type. The kind who, when a friend asks for advice on figuring out what to do with their life, recounts their entire absolutely perfect plan without realizing how just painfully smug they come across as. Plot twist (I bet no one saw that coming), but life absolutely had other plans for me, and little did I know that I literally wouldn’t recognize myself or any of those plans 10 years down the road.

I graduated high school in 2007, and started pursuing a degree in aeronautical engineering at a very prestigious college, with the dream of one day working for NASA. I was absolutely obsessed with all things aviation, and I was completely determined to make a career as an engineer in the aerospace industry. Several years into chasing that dream, medical issues derailed everything, and I was forced to abandon my degree and start dealing with some things that were out of my control. I had to start literally everything over from scratch. With my plans all completely scattered to the wind by what I was dealing with medically, I moved to Colorado to be with my family, started a job at a car dealership (not exactly the work I’d been hoping to do on the Space Shuttle, but BMWs had their redeeming qualities too), and started trying to work out just where to go from there. The short answer to that question was, I had no idea.

I drifted along for the next several years, moving from one aimless job to the next, looking for something to fill the hole in my life that being unable to pursue the career I’d dreamed of in aviation had left. I’ve always been extremely into the technical side of things (hence the aeronautical engineering thing), and as a hobby, I started playing around with Linux, eventually converting my daily driver laptop over to a Debian setup. That necessitated learning some basic coding skills, because you can only use a completely stock Linux setup for so long before the endless Reddit screenshots of custom desktops get to you and you start messing with configuration files. It wasn’t long before the engineering nerd in me started getting more and more into learning just how those files actually worked, and eventually, I found myself, like so many others, searching around for the best programming languages to learn. I ended up on The Odin Project, started working through their web development curriculum, and realized pretty quickly that I was hooked. I spent hundreds of hours working through their lessons and reading blogs about how to get started in software development, and at some point, I realized that I really did want to make a career out of this new and exciting thing that I’d originally gotten myself into as a hobby. The only problem was, I had absolutely no idea what I should know to make that career a reality, and despite being a very self motivated learner, I started to hit a wall.

Image from Thinkful Blog

There’s a great graph that I found early in my coding days about the emotional journey of learning to code. It describes starting out, being excited by this new skill that you’re learning, and then, as you learn more and more, falling into complete despair over feeling like you actually have no idea what you’re doing. I got to that point VERY quickly. I started to doubt myself, and wondered whether software development was something I could actually realistically make happen as a career. Going the self-taught route seemed like such a good idea when I was just dabbling in it, but thinking about getting myself to the point where I could pass a technical interview seemed way too daunting to be realistic. I had hit a point where I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and I started to realize that I needed a structured curriculum to feel like I was adequately prepped for making such a big jump in careers. Luckily, around that time, I was working at Amazon, and flyers started to go up for Flatiron School’s Software Development course. I applied, interviewed, had a small nervous breakdown in the week between the interview and the acceptance decision, and only squeaked a little bit when I got the email that I’d been admitted. The instructors have been great so far, and the courses, while they’re a lot to process, are so far exactly what I needed, and they’re absolutely delivering on the overall guidance that I felt I personally needed in place of the free options out there. I’m only a few weeks in, and I’m sure there are a lot of sleepless nights ahead of trying to balance projects and my full time job, but I’m extremely excited about what the future might hold, and can’t wait to get further into the program!