“For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. "

I am not really sure what happened or how 6 months have come and gone.  Sometimes, it seems like the bigger the life changes, the faster time seems to go.

Let’s see.  What’s happened. I have a (almost) 4 year old and a 5 year old. Went to New York for 24 hours to celebrate the marriage of one of my dearest friends. Released another good friend (and au pair) back into the “wild” to thrive.

Oh, and I quit my stable, decent paying job to do a Web Development bootcamp after having written only about 6 lines of basic code. 

No, I am not kidding.  No, I am not exaggerating.  Yes, I am likely crazy.

But, here’s the thing. I wasn’t happy. I have never been one for corporate, bureaucracy, or administrative procedures.

I am the kind of person that questions the status quo, who sees the value in abstract thinking, and who thinks conformity is for the birds. Ok. Sheep.

I realised that it didn’t matter how dynamic, young or popular a large corporation may be, I just don’t identify with it, but also, trying to shove your foot into a shoe that doesn’t fit hurts.  An environment that doesn’t fit isn’t any different.

I’m still not sure why Web Development. Passion project. Trying to solve a work problem. Flexibility. But I love it. 

Part of me is very happy that I discovered it when I did.  I needed to settle into life and be at home in my own skin before I could really decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. 

Sometimes, I am irrationally annoyed that people always told me “computers are for left brained people” or “programming isn’t for you, it is too meticulous”.

Warning: I am about to step up on my feminist soap box.

Programming is NOT a left brain dominant trade.  In order to be a good programmer, you need to have a pretty balanced brain, actually.  Sure, you have to be logical and be able to see detail, but you also need to be able to find alternative solutions and see the overall picture step by step.  You need to use inventiveness to find a solution.  The literal definition of creativity.

I decided to google why there are so few female coders, and the BS that came up boggles my mind: Because women find it boring, because it’s a bad “culture fit”, because, its filled with long projects and lots of stress. I’m sorry. Are you a parent? Cause I am pretty sure that is the definition of a longterm and unbelievably stressful “project”.

Bullshit.  All of it. Did you know that coding was initially a “woman’s job”? According to the Atlantic, programming was actually an “alternative” to secretarial work. During World War II, women were responsible for intercepting and interpreting code, and let’s not forget that it was women of colour that saved NASA’s ass, but in the end it was the white men who took all the credit for it and over the years it has become dominated by caucasian men.

Out of all the interviews I have had, all of them were with white men.

Anyways, annoyance at ignorance, yadda, yadda, yadda, it turns out, programming has more in common with linguistics, than mathematics. Basically, when they ran MRI’s on 17 people, they found out that there was actually wasn’t much stimulus in the areas of the brain that are associated with mathematics.  However, the language portion of the brain lit up like a christmas tree.

Guess what I love, and have always loved? Languages. Guess what it turns out that I love?

Programming.

Guess what I am getting my creative, linguistically inclined daughters started on at 4 and 5 years old?