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For decades, I believed that I could never be a computer programmer. I was wrong.
In elementary school, my brothers were fascinated with computers, playing and writing their own computer games. Since computer games didn't interest me, why should I go into computers?
As a high school student, I stumbled across a computer programming book and tried to teach myself to code. My main memory of the experience is weeks of crying in quiet desperation, curled up in a ball on my bedroom floor, because I could not mentally untangle a particularly difficult concept with few examples and even fewer exercises. Since I couldn't understand that those few pages, how could I become a computer programmer?
Once in college, I enrolled in an introductory programming course. The class had barely started when the computer science department announced that the language being taught was obsolete and students would learn a different language … starting the next semester. Since I was being taught an obsolete language, how could I become a computer programmer?
In graduate school for technical communications, I enrolled in a computer course about networking as an elective. The first day of class, the professor announced the class had too many students, and he encouraged all non-computer science majors to drop the class before he failed them. A few days later, I reluctantly took his advice and dropped the class. Since I was an English major, I had no business trying to learn computers.
When I worked as a technical writer for various companies, my job was to document how the software worked and teach people how to use the software. I could glimpse at the software development process, but was kept at a distance. The one time I was invited to use the same source control software as the programmers, the invitation was revoked when the programmers found out that my source files were all binary, not text-based. Writing code was for the software engineers, not technical writers.
While on hiatus from the workforce to raise and educate my children, I looked into coding bootcamps. Although I found a couple of well known coding boot camps in my area, they were all cost prohibitive with demanding schedules that didn't work for my family. Since I didn't have thousands of dollars, couldn't put my life on hold for several weeks, and didn't have nights or weekends free, I couldn't become a computer professional.
Eventually, I overcome all of those earlier nay-sayers, including myself! I discovered that solving problems with computer code is far more personally satisfying than playing computer games. I learned that if one resource doesn't make sense, find another one. When I ended up juggling projects with three different programming languages (Visual Basic, PHP, and JavaScript) in the same week, I found that knowing any specific computer language is less important than being able to think through a coding problem. Most importantly, I realized that I loved coding.
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