From Preschool Teacher to Software Engineer
When I choose the path to become an early childhood educator, all I could think about was the impact I could make in child’s life. Teaching preschool is very different from teaching older grades. Once a child reaches kindergarten the focus becomes academic. The soft skills, such as learning to deal with conflicts, frustration, making plans and following through, taking turns, and making friends are rarely taught in kindergarten and often not supported. Mastering the social/emotional, cognitive skills that will actually determine a chid’s success in elementary school and beyond — teaching those skills is the job of a preschool teacher.
After teaching preschool for seven years, and though I felt I was still making an impact, and was still passionate about teaching, I started to feel disconnected. I wanted to try something else. I just didn’t know what yet. A year went by and the feeling of being unfulfilled in my career was taking a toll on me.
I heard about Code Tenderloin’s Code Ramp Program — which is a 6 week course that teaches the basics of Javascript taught by volunteers and I decided to give it a try. Little did I know that a few months later I would be joining a software engineering bootcamp and on a path to actually change careers.
In 15 weeks I learned tons of new information. I was overwhelmed most of the time. But working on projects and making those ideas come to life in the span of a week was the highlight for me. I was building a lot of cool things and that’s what I want to do, create apps.
Fifteen weeks ago, I had no idea how to create an app or what an API was. I am now about to finish my fourth app, which is the first project I am working on independently. I built a podcast discoverability app, where users can search podcasts and add the favorites to their playlist.
I am fetching data from an external API to display podcasts in my React app. I implemented features I never thought I would be able to — such as drag and drop, parallax and infinite scrolling. Without a doubt, learning to code has been the one of the toughest challenges I ever faced. But when I think about all the things I can and will make I know the world is open to new possibilities.
