Learning to Code, Part 1: Early Beginnings

Learning to code is one hell of an adventure.

I’ve spoken about the start of my journey often, and I think it’s a fun story, mostly because I end up with a free tablet out of it!

I’ll write it all out here, and leave it for your perusal, and hopefully I won’t need to write it again. Or, if I do, at least I have the story in one place to refer to!

In 2005, I earned my Girl Scout Gold Award by creating a “program” in power point to help younger girls earn their Bronze Award. This was my first introduction to programming, in a strange way. A few months later, I was telling my new boyfriend about it, and he had me look at getting it on the web and I started learning HTML, and CSS.  At the time, my career goals were to become an athletic trainer for the best hockey club in the world, the Detroit Red Wings, so I didn’t really dedicate a lot of time to learning it. I gave up easily when I ran into issues because it wasn’t what I wanted to do professionally.

Well, I went to college, dreams changed, I decided I made a better fan than athletic trainer (plus, I just did not enjoy the coursework). I changed majors to something that I enjoyed, but knew I’d never work in. A year and a half later, I graduated with my BS in Theatre, Interpretation, and Dance. I do not regret this time at all. It was some of the most enriching time in my life. The people I met, and the experiences I had will be with me forever, in a special happy place in my heart.

I graduated college not knowing what I wanted to do for a living, I bounced around to various temp jobs, ended up in a permanent position at a non-profit, but I discovered that it wasn’t *quite* what I wanted to do. I got very lucky there though, because they wanted to do various techy type things. Which I am being vague about on purpose, because they wanted tiny bits of everything. Web, mobile apps, internal work, very multi-faceted. Unfortunately, money was not on their side, and I ended up getting laid off.

However! Before I got to the point of losing my job, the summer of 2012 happened! My husband at the time (the aforementioned boyfriend) had gotten a ticket to Google’s developer conference, I/O. They are well known for their swag, and I had a hunch that one of the giveaways was going to be a tablet. But he didn’t want to wait for that, and wanted to get a tablet before then. After much back and forth, the deal was struck: he buys the tablet, and if I was right, and he got a free one at I/O, it would be mine.

I have a Nexus 7 2012 I/O edition. #win

Because of this deal, I ended up watching the keynote on the first day of the conference to see if I won. I was fascinated. I saw how Google was changing the world, and thought to myself, I want to do that. I want to change the world.

I started learning JavaScript the next day.