Never in a million years did I think I would like coding, let alone like it enough to pursue a career in it.
I’ll take you back to the beginning…
In 2010, I met my now-husband, and he’s fantastic–intellectual, ambitious, patient and caring. He was the love of my life! However, marriage was a challenge. He was American and I was Singaporean and that meant one of us had to move across the globe to stay together. I was finishing a degree in counseling while we dated. After my graduation, he proposed and I decided that I’ll be the one to move. I thought then that I could find a job in school counseling in the US. My background was 3 years of teaching and 1-year clinical experience as a counselor. Little did I know that counselors need 3 years of further training to attain licensure to practice in the States.
I talked to practicing counselors and learned that I had 2 options:
- Take out loans to get a masters in counseling, or
- Save my money and return to teaching.
So I started applying for full-time teaching positions. Job-hunting occupied me for around 6 draining hours per day, and I was restless. That’s why I began to code on the side—something I could look forward to everyday.
I began with Codecademy. Free coding courses! Great! I was so excited! It was a huge adventure, learning something completely alien to me. I never attended a single computer class in my life and didn’t know any coders. Here I was embarking in a journey completely out of my comfort zone. It was kind of weird yet thrilling.
There were days when I felt like I was achieving something! Computer is one the greatest inventions of all time and here I was giving instructions to that very invention. I was very excited to be making things!
And then there were days that I would type 4 lines of code and tinker with it for an hour trying to figure where my code went wrong.
These were the days that made me realized how much I enjoyed the challenge of coding and how much l was in the zone when I coded. I loved the details and problem solving. I could have simply walked away from it because it was a free course, I didn’t have to do it but the more I got stuck with my code, the more I persisted. There were days I even forgot to eat lunch because I was so engrossed in my code. That’s when I realized I had fallen in love and had to take this further.
Most of my first year coding, I was also teaching full-time (a temporary position). I was even offered a really attractive permanent job, and to everyone’s surprise, I turned down that offer to enroll in Flatiron School to build my skills in Rails, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS! Today, I’m a graduate of Flatiron school and I proudly call myself a full-stack web developer. My journey into software development was an accident, but it was sure a happy one!