What success in tech means to me.

The finicky thing about success is that it means different things to different people. To some, it means opening a start up, working for juggernaut tech companies, or a really fat salary. As someone who chose to go to a bootcamp as opposed to a pursuing computer science degree, I came from a field and a professional trajectory that I was, simply put, dissatisfied with. The Flatiron School was a way to throw a wrench in that cog.

The beginning of my journey to my transition from Human Services to the field Software began about a year ago. On my lunch break, or sometimes when work was slow, I logged on to my code academy account and tried to learn python from scratch. As I was struggling to figure out what a function was (don’t judge, we’ve all been there), I realized that this demanded of me far more than any amount of mundane paperwork ever did. It challenged me to persevere through something that made me fairly uncomfortable: a tedious and incredibly frustrating learning process. Although that level of frustration persists to the present, the reward it brings when you finally grasp a concept is enough (I finally figured out what a function is).

The seemingly small and insignificant act of stepping out of my comfort zone (and staying out of it) opened up a world to me that I was totally oblivious to before. It has allowed me to challenge myself in several ways, to get out of a job that made me miserable, and introduced me to a field where the only direction at this point is up