Have you ever felt the urge to take control of your life after a series of unfortunate events?
Earlier this year, I made the choice to take control of my career after much self reflection and reading The Alchemist. A story about a boy on an adventure to find his “personal legend.” The pandemic was a blessing in disguise and allowed me to reflect on what I wanted for my future self and how I wanted to align my personal values with my career. Since then I’ve learned HTML, CSS, Javascript, MySQL, Python, Flask and Django. My current focus is on projects using Python and Django.
My passion for languages and bringing ideas to life drew me into the world of coding. Like many Millennials, I wrote my first line of code during the Myspace era. As a “third culture kid” in California with Spanish and Filipino roots, I found that learning new languages helped me to better connect with people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
Life had certain challenges I had to overcome, and like many others, I felt confined by some of my culture’s traditional expectations to conform to the traditional paths within healthcare. Coming from an immigrant Filipino family, I was urged to study nursing, but I chose to major in Marketing at Cal State Northridge instead. At the time, I thought it was a practical approach to marry my interests in psychology and new technologies.
The focus of my education was marketing analytics, but I actually had more luck finding internships on the finance side. Those finance internships at Paramount and IMAX led to my first job as a business analyst for Deluxe, an international post production firm, and as a financial analyst at Row 8, a video streaming startup.
Like many others who re-evaluated their paths in the midst of the global pandemic, however, I realized that it was time to take a more proactive role over my career. I put in my two weeks and began a self-guided coding bootcamp called Coding Dojo.
The first three months felt so lonely. I was used to having a stable job and an active social life. But I knew I could not succeed unless I fully dedicated myself to this career transition. I studied for 12 hours, six days a week. All I ever did was Eat, Sleep, Code. I felt out of touch with the rest of the world and current events but I committed myself to this path. I had trouble getting a firm grasp on some of the more difficult coding concepts and cried a few more times than I’d like to admit, but I kept going. Not many people shed light on how truly difficult it is to break osmosis and rewire your brain to be the best version of yourself. To enter a foreign world or in this case an industry in order to meet your true potential. I couldn’t have made it without the online tech community and my supportive partner who kept me motivated whenever I hit a roadblock on my path. Thank you, to all of those who have been part of my journey thus far.
Beginning in September, I became more consistent in documenting my coding journey in a Google doc and on Twitter. My plan is to migrate the Google doc entries over to this blog to more formally illustrate my progression. Throughout the past 50 days:
- Spoke at my first Twitter Space.
- I have continued working on my second website, Baby Club.
- Worked on more algorithms in both Javascript and Python.
- Met amazing people that gave me valuable feedback on how to improve with coding.
- All while trying to find a balance with other areas of my life and most importantly prioritizing my mental and physical health.
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post.
Follow me on twitter: @miasibala for more frequent updates.