"Bring anger and pride under your feet, turn them into a ladder and climb higher." - Rumi
For the past decade, I've spent every weekend, and major holiday hunkered down in some of the finest kitchens a major American city had to offer; working towards mastering a craft truly poured myself into. I missed birthdays and funerals, the birth of my niece, among many other life events. This fact is not something distinct to my story, its how professional fine dining kitchens function; which is primarily upon the passion and grit of those who chose this vocation. This time last year I was just about burnt out, being the 'Chef de Partie' at The Four Seasons was an excruciatingly demanding job. By that juncture I had learned just about everything I ever dreamt to know about the culinary world.
Learning has always been the spark that drives me, I was no longer learning, aptly so I was the one doing the teaching. I've always coveted area's of knowledge where the skill ceiling is practically untouchable. I identified years ago during my undergraduate studies that coding had exactly these qualities. Post college, the job market in 2011 was still stifled by several economic mishaps - so finding a job wasn't exactly panning out for me. For practicalities' sake, kitchens were an easy gig to get, it wasn't before long that I saw all the qualities I admired about my other pursuits in cooking. The rest was history as they say.
Here we are now, full circle. The pandemic gave me the window I needed to slow down and get my priorities straight. I began getting certified by Google in several technical fields, and pivoting my career back to technology didn't seem so out of reach as it once did. I began to feel that learner's mindset returning to me, and with it I knew that I was ready to take on something new once more. The into the fire approach so to speak has always been appealing to me, so it wasn't long before I had fixated on Flatiron as exactly that.
I can extoll upon the qualities I see mirrored in coding from the world of cooking all day, but to be concise I'll spare us. There is an element of creation, making something distinctly yours from raw building blocks so to speak. There is the personal flourish that makes your work its own, and there is the real sense of honing a set of skills that are applicable in the minute and minutia onto then the macro scale. Within coding I recognize the same 'kernal' of possibility and greatness.
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