Why I Code

For my first blog post, I feel it is necessary to discuss why exactly I love coding so much and why I have decided to pursue a career in software development. For as long as I can remember I have always been someone who loved problem solving, puzzles and building new things. From a young age, I was always the kid who would be building legos quietly in the corner for hours on end. As this curiosity grew academically, while not always the best student I always took classes in science and art because I always loved creating pieces of art while also always being extremely interested in biology and physics. So, when I finally got to college and discovered programming in an intro class I naturally I fell in love with it. Coding I found was the perfect marriage of freedom and creativity while simultaneously being an extremely interesting deep science where you can always be discovering new things. Over the course of my college career, I discovered many new and brilliant things you could do in code and worked on many projects that I found very interesting.

After college it was time to pursue a career in software development, I of course naively thought that the demand for software engineers was so high, that although I never considered myself an excellent programmer my passion and enthusiasm would shine through and I would easily land a job in Seattle where I grew up and have lots of friends and family and had hoped to start my career. Obviously I could not have been more wrong. I combed through thousands of entry-level job postings that required a minimum of five years’ experience, applied to what seemed like thousands of jobs and maybe one in one hundred jobs called me back and/or gave me an interview. In most of my interviews, I came away thinking I had done just alright. I always found the interviewer would ask a question about a data structure, programming framework or some other technical concept I had never learned in school. The job search experience made me slowly realize my more formal education had given me tons of interesting knowledge in the programming world and had made me a more or less a jack of all trades but a master of none. The result being that I was not highly employable as a developer with just my degree at least not in the very competitive market Seattle had become. I gave up on my dream for a little while and took an unrelated job in property management. I worked at property management for a little over and a year a half during which time I let my passion for programming slowly drift away into hibernation. This fall though I decided I had to make one more all-out effort to get the job and career of my dreams. I looked at where I was at and the fact that I was missing some key elements and more importantly I hadn’t coded anything of significance in close two years all issues I needed to fix. I started looking into coding boot-camps and Flatiron seemed like the perfect fit for what I needed.