As I venture into my first week of coding Bootcamp to become a software engineer, I would like to reflect on my decisions that have led me here to learn to code. I’d like to start off by stating that I have always been a technophile since I was a child. One of my fondest memories is of my mother purchasing me the old Macintosh that came out in 1983, you know the one with that infamous commercial. Of course, I’m not that old rather my mother purchased this computer for me in 1996 so it was pretty dated by then, however, when you consider the fact that I grew up in a rural town, it is often hard to easily come across new technology. Never the less, that old monochrome hunk of beautiful plastic sparked my interest in technology.

Rather than speaking about how I was in my school’s technology and robotics club and how I first learned HTML through a high school course or by editing my myspace profile. Or how I learned to love the Linux Terminal while I was a graduate student trying to keep myself occupied while I sought a job as a historian. Or how when I got my first job as a teacher I had an extremely rough time that rudely awoke me to try to find a way to get out of that place as soon as possible.

That being said, I wish to talk about reasons why I did not choose to learn to code sooner, or why it took me so darn long to become fully divulged and dedicated to becoming a software engineer. Growing up I have always been terrible at mathematics. So when I went to college I actively chose not to become a CS major despite wanting to become one as a high school freshman. For me, the word “engineer” brought about an incredibly wrong connotation of you needed to be a whiz at math. So as an incoming freshman I avoided that like the plague! Oh, how wrong I was! It really was not until I started running commands on the Linux Terminal that I had that aha moment! I said wait a minute, is this what coding really is? So I started to research more and more and I realized that I really wanted to code! I found out about coding Bootcamps and after much consideration, I have finally jumped all in and am now writing during my first week of Flatiron Schools!

Wish me luck!