So what are you doing with your life..?

- asked by every family member every day of your twenties -

It’s an immense struggle for a lot of the U.S. population to figure out what to do with their lives. Sure, there’s those select few who just know from the time they were little or by the time they reach their twenties what they want to do. They can see the goal in front of them and it’s so clear it’s what they should be doing and they’re passionate about it and you can see them thrive. The rest of us I think just choose something. Ultimately you choose something and you go with it.

I’ve been struggling to figure out what to do with my life. I’ve looked at my skills, my passions, what I love, what I care about, what I enjoy. And I’ve bounced around ideas from civil engineering, to music, to nursing, to math, to teaching. And in this jumbled mess of ideas that has been the last 4 years, I stumbled upon web development. I spent the last year toying with JavaScript, Python, Django, Ruby on Rails, trying to build some applications, see the colors and ideas go from theory and abstract to real life pulsing on the internet that I can instantly share with anyone.

Though I wasn’t the person who just knew when I was little what I wanted to do, and even now there’s always a level of uncertainty, I saw something in coding that jumped out at me. The opportunity to be creative. To be a part of huge projects that can change people’s lives. The opportunity to constantly challenge myself. To work hard. To know that I wouldn’t have been able to do something I just did last week or last month. I love that feeling of approaching a problem, knowing I have absolutely no clue how to do it and then after 7 or 8 hours look back and realized I did it. Somehow I discovered the answer. I found a way to make it happen.

It’s extremely rewarding. It’s fun. It is frustrating, but the reward is so high when you can tangibly see things happen in front of you. And it’s constantly changing and evolving. I know that I can count on being a learner the rest of this career. It’s not something I’ll settle with or stay at a certain level, I’ll constantly be in this overwhelming playground of ideas and technologies and excitement.

I’ve been chasing the new languages and technologies and it’s impossible to keep up. It’s this shallow type of learning where I study a language or technology for a week and instantly try to implement it. Yeah, it’s fun to spin up a Rails app in 20 minutes, but I want to know how to make scalable applications. Applications that are secure. What security even means or tangibly looks like. I want to know what’s holding Rails up? What’s underneath all these tech stacks and languages and new technologies? What ultimately is programming? What is code? How is it built out? How was Ruby built? What was it built with?

And further, when I look at a problem, I don’t want to be thinking about where the semicolon goes or if I missed a set of parentheses. I want to see it as a problem that I can break down and solve, regardless of the language. I’ve had this sense of lostness about coding where I feel like I’m spinning my wheels trying to keep up with all the changing tech and so there’s basic coding problems that I still struggle with. I want to get to the foundational level of coding where I can feel like a programmer, not someone who can watch tutorials and spin up web apps.

At this point in my life, it is my passion and my drive and motivation. I want to have that foundation. I want to jump into an interview and ultimately an engineering team feeling like I can play an active role in problem-solving and finding solutions. And from there, anything is possible. I really believe that. I think we’re living in just the beginning stages of where Software Engineering is headed and I want to be part of it.