Why I learnt to code...

I never thought I wanted to learn to code, in fact it is probably something that would have never even crossed my mind had I not found myself in search of a new career.

Let me give you a quick background, I was a dance teacher and I loved my job but the hours were sporadic and I felt I lacked career progression. I wanted a challenge, a career I could work my way up in and something I could see myself still doing as I got older. That’s where coding came in.

Well, to be honest it came a year and a half later after a short spell in recruitment and turning back to teaching, still trying to find that new career. It was my boyfriend who convinced me to take a look into web development, he himself being a software engineer experienced first-hand how much of a rewarding career it could be if not just the challenge I was looking for.

Fast forward to now and with the hit of COVID-19, I found myself like a lot of people in a very different situation, with a very different outlook and a need for something different. That side challenge of coding around work, suddenly looked more like a career prospect and I found a new sense of determination to get to that point. So I continued, I took courses on Udemy, free code camp, Scrimba (all of which are brilliant resources!), I completed projects, updated my GitHub, my CV anything to get myself ready to start applying for jobs in the field.

So now here I am a former dancer trying to become a professional developer…let’s see what happens.


Popular posts from this blog

Thinking about thinking...

Image
                                         Focus this week: This week after spending time on practice questions I decided to place my focus on recursion. Recursion is something that has come up a few times when pair programming with my boyfriend. He is a senior software developer and is a big fan of it, I on the other hand was not as convinced. A function calling itself? now that's confusing, however, it did get my attention. So I decided to delve deeper, reading and watching various software engineers' blogs and explanations to try and help me get a better grasp on the concept. My boyfriend and I have also been putting recursion into practice, having a go at some common problems that lend themselves to a recursive solution and working through them. One of these was inverting a binary tree, which after looking at data structures last week at least meant I knew what this would visually look like. As we worked through the problem before I knew it my function was calling itself, usi
Read more

Keeping an open mind...

Image
Focus this week: This week has been a slight detour from my current learning journey after being asked by a few friends and family about creating a website for them. So, I have been looking into WordPress, an open-source content management system that is used by many to create websites. Now you don't have to write any code for it which is great for those not interested in learning to code. However, there are developers who use PHP to create custom plugins and themes, so it caters for everyone dependent on how deeply you want to delve into it. I spent the week looking into the basics as I didn't have any prior knowledge other than knowing WordPress built websites. So far, it seems pretty self explanatory when creating content and there are also advanced settings where knowledge of HTML and CSS comes into play. Coding knowledge is also useful if something isn't perhaps working how you may expect it to as you can just jump into the code editor and debug the issues there.   I h
Read more

Things are starting to add up...

Image
Focus this week: This week has been about maths and how it relates to software engineering. After trying out JavaScript challenges I realised I needed to brush up on my basic maths knowledge. For a lot of people (including me) when you hear the word “algebra” or “equations” it can cause a feeling of panic and dread, especially if it is something that you don’t use regularly. However, actually looking back at these maths topics as an adult has made me realise they are perhaps not as daunting as I once thought. In fact, I would even say I have quite enjoyed the process of relearning topics I hadn’t covered since school.  I think this comes down to a mixture of the great resources out there (especially apps such as khan academy and brilliant that give you the ability to access and complete short lessons daily wherever you may be), as well as coming to it from a new perspective, as a tool that will aid me rather than another subject on the timetable. So for those of you who still
Read more