I have always been enamored with computers. Starting at a very young age from the old Mac and Windows 3.1 computers my dad would bring home from work, I was hooked. How did these things work? Sure, I loved playing games on these wonderful, mysterious toys, but that wasn’t enough; I wanted to make the games. Poring over technical books my family had about computers, I tried to immerse myself in “code” and programming concepts far too complex for a younger me to understand. Little progress was made, but the seed had been planted. I had no idea what I was doing, but I loved it. I wanted more.
In middle school, I discovered a program aptly called GameMaker. It would be the catalyst to my programming journey. It offered a very acessible drag-and-drop interface to get started, but a proprietary coding langauge lived at its core. Making games is much more fun than playing them, I soon discovered. My creations were crude and basic, but the experience of making games and showing them to friends was euphoric. Creative pursuits have always appealed to me. Before I could program, I would draw illustrations of worlds I wanted to create. And with coding, now I could bring those ideas to life. It was amazing.
The flame that coding had for me dimmed for a while, but it never extinguished. I took on new hobbies in high school, but I returned to Web development in college. For a short time I tried to teach myself C+, but I lacked the discipline to really excel with that language. Though code and technical pursuits never lost their appeal for me, I started to drift away. Maybe I convinced myself that programming as a career was too daunting? Whatever the reason, I shifted my energy on my full-time job, which for 7 years after college was for a class action administration company. I did not enjoy the work, but I thought it was practical. It made sense, I thought. Well, I burned myself out, I didn’t get the position I wanted in the company, and I left. It was time for a change.
It is time to learn how to code for real and to make a career out of doing something I have a passion for, and after months of research, I have concluded Flatiron School is the best course of action to achieve this. Here I am, and I am so excited to learn.