Like quite a few others working in the tech industry, I did not major in computer science, or any STEM related field for that matter, thus don’t have that “traditional” technical education background. Yes, I dabbled in CS classes here and there, which eventually led to a minor, but I never really thought that I would develop a career in tech. The last CS course I took actually made me feel completely inept at coding and all but smothered the remaining hope I had in pursuing a career in this industry. The interest was still there, but the belief that I could was pretty much extinguished.

So then why did I participate in a coding fellowship, the summer before my senior year, the summer dubbed as the most important career-building time for an about-to-be-thrown-into-the-real-world adult? Honestly, I don’t really know. At that point, I am pretty sure that I was in pure panic mode about not being remotely employable after graduation. After all, I was a psychology major, which doesn’t exactly scream “hire me!” to most companies. I thoroughly enjoyed studying psychology but gave it really little thought as to how it could translate into an actual career. And so a slightly groundless and extremely desperate thought of mine convinced me that employers hire those who are not only tech savvy but also code literate, even if none of the job requirements were tangentially related to tech. Thus, I applied for a coding fellowship offered by a small St. Louis-based tech company.

The list of things I ended up learning that summer is quite extensive, and it wasn’t just limited to coding. Towards the end, I had become really interested in JQuery and AJAX and so shaped the remaining portion of my summer creating something that I wanted to use in my own daily life, a task list app. I know it wasn’t the most creative project or complicated at all, but I wanted to create a user experience that I myself wanted, so the task app ended up being one with various collapsibles, drag and drop reorderings of lists and tasks, and color customization. It was cute, but it has been since rendered pretty useless to me because of my inability to access it from other devices, since my database was locally kept.

Over the next couple of summers, I've been able to watch the fellowship grow and continue to teach these valuable skills to under-represented individuals in tech and have also been able to become a resourse within it as well. Around the time when the company was starting up its third class of coding fellows, I began to reflect a lot on my progress and how I got to where I was at that point. This was about six months into my role as a Software Engineer, but up until that point, I really had a hard time calling myself a true engineer or a dev.

It just felt like a huge case of imposter syndrome, even after I had been told that the fellowship had in some way been proven successful by evidence of my progression as a developer. I found it so troublesome, or strange rather, largely due to the lack of confidence I had in my abilities. Looking back at the first few months, I think I am absolutely correct in stating that I was a terrible coder, simply because I just straight up did not know how to do a lot of things. But I had the persistence, the patience, and the passion to keep trying. Since then, I've improved by an immense measure, learned better techniques, developed an inquisitive mind, and began discovering what sort of engineer I want to be.

Imagine the most simplistic static site, comprised of a navigation bar ripped off of W3Schools (God bless that site) and boxes with good ole 1px solid borders that were all melded together in unity by the most perfect color palette of pink and purple hues that I had so meticulously selected. I like to think that it vaguely resembled an early 2000s website. So yeah - it was pretty ugly, but I was proud of it nonetheless.

The sheer atrocity of it, I think, would have been fun to juxtapose with this React version, but I don’t have most of that code anymore.

Now, I could have simply made an account on a website building platform and designed a beautifully smooth site with flawless UI, interactive scrolling, and other fancy features, but I feel like there would have been a certain shame in using one of those, as someone who is building a career in software engineering / web development. Also I’m frugal. You have to pay monthly subscriptions to those, and I wanted to spend the bare minimum - so basically, just this domain name.

I know there really isn’t a lot going here, but it was fun to set up. And so I’m pretty pleased with the outcome.

To have a continuous deployment of this site, I’m using Netlify, which offers a free-tier account. And for the styling, I have implemented a design by StyleShout. I knew I needed a base structure but wanted to do a lot more customizing to experiment and also showcase some creativity. Lastly, the background image for my header was provided by Eberhard Grossgasteiger on Unsplash.

So then, where do I go on from here? I'm not exactly sure, but I know I want to at least continue doing something similar to what I am doing right now, which is building my skills as a well-rounded software engineer. Yes, my experiences have mostly been in front-end web dev projects, since I very much enjoy seeing the outlook of software, and improving the UX, but I'm always open to learning to do new things and solving challenging problems. And I believe that my growth through my first year as a full time Software Engineer has really showcased my ability to learn quickly and efficiently.

I love speaking to industry professionals and getting different perspectives in fields related to tech, since there are a myriad of opportunities out there and many things that I have yet to discover. And as I continue to build my expertise and career, I hope to one day become the person that people, who are in situations similar to my current one, seek out for mentorship.

So I’d love to connect with you, especially since you have stuck with me to the end. So please shoot me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn!