It's not uncommon for one to assume that it's too late to switch career paths, but it happens all the time! Read this inspiring story that was posted on www.Mashable.com about a woman who took her future into her own hands and became a programmer! You can find the rest of the story here!
-Worlco
Is It Too Late to Change Career Paths and Become a Programmer?
This question originally appeared on Quora.
I am 24 years old and just started learning coding. I want to be a programmer. Am I too late in the game?
Answer by Erin Parker, founder of Spitfire Athlete.
It's never too late. So much can happen in a year, it can amaze you.
I majored in economics. When I was about 23 years old, I randomly decided to go to aRailsbridge Meetup, where you learn how to make a basic Ruby on Rails app in a day. I made a basic Rails app and very much enjoyed it. A seed was planted that day.
Months later, I had an idea for a website I've always wanted to build. Although my idea was vague, I imagined [this website] would inspire women to be kick*ss go-getters. I thought it would either be a career website, or one in the health and fitness space. And I definitely wanted to call it Spitfire. I strongly felt such a product was sorely needed, and I felt I had a pretty good perspective and vision to create it.
Although I hadn't committed to learning programming just yet, I would sketch out mocks like this:
IMAGE: QUORA, ERIN PARKER
I would email these mocks to my friends and get their feedback.
At the time, I was getting pretty hardcore into lifting weights and I was seeing a lot of results. I was also having a frustrating time finding high quality, trustworthy resources for women who lift weights, and had this continuous nagging feeling that maybe I should actually do something about it.
Finally, I decided to do it. Friends were asking me how I was getting in shape, how to lift weights, how to eat healthy. I decided to commit to learning Ruby on Rails and building out [my idea].
I figured if I learned to program — even if I failed — I would have at least failed while building something that could help scale what I'd learned to potentially millions of people. And that in itself is a worthy pursuit.
At the same time, however, I decided failure was no longer an option. I wasn't going to let myself stop until I'd built what I'd envisioned in my head Spitfire could truly be. I knew that if I just persisted through the pain (like an athlete), that the end result would be well worth the temporary pain.
I started teaching myself Ruby on Rails by voraciously consuming every free resource I could, like Learn Ruby the Hard Way, Try Ruby, Codecademy, Michael Hartl's book Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, the Rails Guides, and my absolute favorite, RailsCasts.
I was relentless, If I didn't get something the first time, I didn't care. I would go through it again and again until it started to make sense. I would look for different explanations of the concept. I would ask my friends. When I was coding in coffee shops, if the person sitting in front of me looked like they were an engineer based on the stickers on their laptop, I would kindly ask them if they could help (I have made so many friends this way, a few of them are still really good friends).
I would go to lots of developer meetups, and particularly liked Women Who Code because of their "teach a new tutorial at each meetup" format, and all of The Ruby Group meetups; it was easy to get help [if I was stuck].
I stuck with it for months and, little by little, "banged out" the ideas in my head. You can still see many of my early projects here:
I worked the most on this one:
READ MORE HERE!
No comments:
Post a Comment