My journey to becoming a web developer is a winding one that took me from hard sciences to foreign languages and back; from Wisconsin to Europe and back! Bloc has allowed me to refocus my efforts and get pointed in the direction of a long and successful career in web development.

Once Upon a Time…

… I was a math nerd in High School. You could find me on buses going to Mathlete or Science Olympiad gatherings, attending DECA (marketing and economics) competitions, or hunkered down in the music room with the band director. I thought for sure I’d be a math/physics major when I headed off to Northfield, Minnesota to attend Carleton College. That’s why it surprised me so much when I fell in love with French in college. I’d never been exposed to it before and all of a sudden it was all I could think about!

As a foreign language major, I had tons of adventures all through undergrad. Finally, as I was nearing graduation, I took my first Computer Science course. I had always been fairly technically inclined and I had worked for the media and visual IT department on campus for four years, so I thought a CS intro course would be a fun way to supplement my capstone course. If I thought it would just be amusing, I was way off - it was incredibly fun and extremely engrossing! I loved being able to create something complex and (hopefully) useful by stacking up little computer commands. Seeking efficiency has always been an instinct for me and now I had the means by which to create digital tools that could help me address the inefficiencies I was noticing around me. Although it was just one 10 week class, it would be the beginning of my development career.

Across the Pond

After graduating, I moved to France and pursued a formal musical education for three years. I ended up abandoning that path, but it was really my activities on the side that continued to inform my development career. In order to pay for school and life, I worked for a while as an English teacher, but in 2013 I got a job as a translator for FluentU. This ended up being a key part of my growth, because FluentU was a young company and, despite its growth, was using some rather inefficient processes and was struggling to track productivity metrics and content trends. My burning desire to be more efficient kicked into gear and I began using JavaScript (Google Apps Scripts) to create content management tools, translation aids, and various pieces of automation to facilitate productivity and improve data gathering. In addition to making us more efficient, the tools I developed also helped our translators do more of what they loved and less of the logistical tedium.

During my third year of my musical studies I began to think more and more about what the future held. I struggled to see myself as a professional musician and I realized that, when I got home at the end of the day, the thing I was most eager to do was code. I loved what I was doing for FluentU, but I was also getting excited to branch out into fully fledged web development. I was burning through tons of tutorials on CodeSchool.com, Codecademy.com, RailsTutorial.org and I was getting tired of ‘hello world’ projects. I wanted to create tools, apps, and sites that people used and loved to use!

Madison: Reloaded

I finished up that academic year, but instead of re-enrolling for the following year, I started applying for jobs. Without the credentials or a degree in the hard sciences, I struggles to get the attention I needed to land the right job. So, I branched out a bit and found an opportunity working for Epic, a health care software company in Madison, Wisconsin (my home state) where I had a few friends working who could at least refer me. I was working as an IT support engineer and Citrix administrator for Epic customers. It wasn’t web development, but it was a fast-growing, well recognized and respected company in the tech industry and I knew that, once inside, I would likely be able to continue my learning and pivot to web development more easily.

A year and a half into my time at Epic, I decided I wasn’t making enough progress toward my goals and needed more structure to help me along. I did some research on possibilities for remote coding bootcamps and was impressed by Bloc and its approach to helping young developers enter the job market. My previous coding experience helped me tremendously as I moved through the Bloc curriculum and allowed me to go a bit further with each project, adding my own personal flare as well as exploring topics that were of particular interest to me. I continue to work through the Bloc curriculum and become more and more passionate about becoming a web developer, dedicating more than just my free time to building great web sites and applications!