i'm actually pretty bad at coding i didn't start coding in high school or enter any competitive programming competitions i didn't write my first line of code until college and even then i felt pretty meh about it to me coding was a way into getting more freedom outside of work by earning more money and landing a stable job that's it i never really stopped to think whether i liked coding until i was encouraged to let go of my preconceived notions about programming and realizing that it takes focused effort and learning for things to finally click if
you're in a position where you feel like you're struggling to grasp even the most basic concepts of programming you are not alone i was there and sometimes i still need a battle imposter syndrome to feel like i belong in the industry back when i first started college programming was nowhere near my radar of things i wanted to attend unfortunately or fortunately i still had to take an intro to programming class as a biomedical engineering major we learned about object-oriented programming and structuring code in classes basically making your code more efficient and recyclable shout out to
inheritance at the time i used java as a programming language in a small but powerful ide eclipse and honestly i hated it i had no idea what the heck encapsulation or polymorphism was i didn't know what the difference between overriding and overloading was and throwing exceptions do you throw an exception and then catch it or was it the other way around what came first the catch or the throw well the throw would have to come before the catch but if you haven't caught anything how do you know how to throw it anyways i just wanted
to make tic-tac-toe games and colorful uis i didn't really understand all the hype around the fundamentals eventually i did what any other struggling college student would do when they weren't really doing well in class i started going to ta sessions wait ta sessions i'm pretty sure you were blacked out drunk all of freshman year there's no way you went to those uh yeah okay so i did slack off a bit my freshman year i guess but that came to bite me in the butt when i got my first c in chemistry i quickly realized that
the biomedical engineering life wasn't for me so i leaned back on the one coding class i took remember the intro to object-oriented programming class i mentioned earlier well yeah i got a b-minus in it so not great but also not terrible for someone who put the bare minimum effort into classes that year i quickly started to realize two things a i'm not that good at coding and b i just want to survive getting through a computer science degree long enough to start making six figures i know a very noble game so fast forward a bit
to my sophomore in junior years i was taking classes like discrete math intro to algorithms and numerical analysis i kind of glazed over those prerequisites but finally came alive during two classes the first was data structures and algorithms now if you're currently grinding leak code you may have a slightly different view of data structures and algorithms but for me it had a similar effect to calculus when i was first learning that calculus was like a magic symphony that combined trigonometry algebra geometry and just basic arithmetic and spatial reasoning up until then i had no idea
why i was even learning about the properties of an obtuse or scalene triangle similarly data structures combine logical reasoning discrete math and yes even the dreaded object-oriented programming into one beautiful monolith it finally started to become more fun to understand what a binary search tree was or even how to recurse through a graph structure using the a-star algorithm fast forward a bit more and i took another amazing class that sparked my interest intro to artificial intelligence now when you think of artificial intelligence you may picture self-serving robots that annihilate humans off of the face of
the earth but in reality they do pretty boring and mundane tasks by just adapting their functionality based on how a human would adapt their strategy when they learn something new this is where i learned how to use neural networks for pattern recognition and created a machine learning algorithm to play mancala against myself spoiler alert the computer beat me 99 of the time i was feeling pretty good until i landed my first internship the internship was at a small company in minnesota called delegate it was a fun summer i created a tool to analyze employee and
manager interactions at restaurants such as mcdonald's taco bell and kfc but i had no clue what i was doing i didn't really understand what razor code was and i mostly used c-sharp in the dot-net framework this was the first time that i was introduced to concepts such as the cicd process creating and functional tests agile methodology as well as just understanding how to deploy code into the different environments and be versatile enough to take criticism when my code wasn't good this was the start of understanding what it takes to be a software engineer being a
software engineer meant way more than just coding it meant understanding high-level abstractions of systems and knowing what to code and when anyways back to the internship i felt like i was being productive yet i didn't have a deep understanding of what was going on essentially i was just going through the motions to be honest i had applied to places like us bank and target whenever i would go to the career fair but i could never pass their interviews because i would get so much anxiety when i was asked to code something in front of other
people i felt like the interviewers were staring into my soul i just never ended up doing that well to meet their bar and forget about applying to places like facebook google or microsoft the lines for these companies would always extend way past the entrance doors of the career fair it was always so intimidating to see people's resumes i was just an average b student that wanted to desperately secure a job but there was no way that i could compete with those other students i was feeling my lowest as i imagined that i would never be
a great programmer just one that was okay enough to squeak by and maybe just maybe get an okay paying job well after that initial reaction things started to change a bit i landed a job at target at this point i had a little more confidence in my interviewing skills since i had now worked for over a year as a software engineer now this is where everything changed i went through a program called the tlp technology leadership program that gave me a chance to do two six-month rotations on different teams kind of like two internships and
then choose a final placement at the end of the year it was during this time that i learned the concept of the growth mindset now a growth mindset is usually contrasted with a fixed mindset a fixed mindset just means that you and i have a fixed innate ability natural abilities when it comes to a profession and there's not much room for variation or growth but with a growth mindset everyone starts at zero and must learn and fail in order to understand a new concept at target i was told that i was given the room to
learn and grow without much pressure to be insanely productive in my first year on the job instead of expecting immediate quantifiable results it was made clear that we the tlpers in the program were there to learn as much as possible so that we could be better engineers in our final placement as soon as i was given permission to switch my mindset to how can i prove my value to this company into how can i learn as much as possible i was finally able to let go of my fixed mindset and realize that being a good
coder didn't mean having a natural talent for coding it meant accepting that everyone sucks at coding in the beginning and the only way to get good at it and really anything for that matter is to be okay with sucking at it it's okay not to understand something and it's okay to ask stupid questions in fact stupider the question a you're being vulnerable enough to admit to yourself that you need something to learn by and b you're actively pursuing knowledge and learning from it rather than pretending that you know something already i always thought that these
companies hired me for the knowledge that i had but rather they were hiring me for the potential of what i could learn and then bring to the table afterwards so equipped with this new mindset i went into every meeting with curiosity and a lust for learning something new it was my final placement where i finally met an amazing mentor that was able to further instill this love for learning in me we had a coding book club where we would read a chapter of the joy of kotlin every week and discuss our learnings we would meet
with other tlps and eventually my own mentees to experiment and try out different variations of a problem we were trying to solve for the sake of learning something new and potentially optimizing our solutions we were told to take our time and truly try to understand the fundamentals instead of just finding the cookie cutter solution to a cookie cutter problem this room for growth and learning is where my love and competence for coding skyrocketed i was finally becoming really confident in my ability to code mostly because i was just giving room to breathe and learn without
any pressure eventually i set my sights even higher with newfound knowledge and landed a job at microsoft a company that 18 year old me never would have imagined getting into thankfully i still feel the same push to grow and learn the psychological safety net in order to eventually become a more productive engineer sure i'm using a different language framework libraries etc but i'm still given the room to breathe and learn so that productivity becomes a consequence of the potential that i've been given room for rather than the priority that many companies seek the whole point
of this long-winded way of explaining my journey to coding is to tell you that it gets better i know it's hard at first and sometimes it can be intimidating to see people that may come off as naturally good but i'm telling you there's a place for everyone at this table if i can do it so can you all it takes is a little faith in yourself and honestly just being okay with starting with a blank slate and slowly painting that flawed but beautiful journey for yourself [Music] you
