Coming into a new year we all think about changes we want to make; changes in our diet, our love lives, work lives, we are going to exercise more, be a better person, travel, yadda, yadda, yadda…you get my drift.
If you add the numbers of this year 2021 they equal the number 5. According to some Numerology schools of thought, the number 5 represents change.
Albert Einstein’s famous quote is always, always on my mind; it is one of my favorites, “Insanity is to do the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
I have been thinking about the question, “Why did you decide to study Software Engineering?” since I began this course for Software Engineering at the Flatiron school.
2020 brought with it so many changes and losses most of us had no control over.
I couldn’t pick or choose which one of my friends or family members would pass away last year, nor would I want to. There were too many to mention; one is too many in my book.
In the final quarter of last year, I took a hard look at where I was and where I wanted to be in the next twenty years. Einstein!!! Do I still want to be doing the same thing expecting different results?
In the beginning, there was DOS
About cough..cough..some hundred years ago or so, I was actually coding but had no idea what I was doing. My first coding experience initially was DOS.
I was a single mom separated from my husband, raising our two sons on Public Assistance and delivering The Long Island Newsday, newspaper part-time. I took a class for single women who wanted to learn computers. Yes, I am talking about DOS, Disk Operating System. It consisted of CLI (command line interface) and a lot of floppy disks. A lot!
I still have a few floppies laying around. I don’t know why. Nostalgia I guess.
I learned DOS, Lotus 1–2–3, Word Perfect, Microsoft Word, and Office on an IBM desktop computer. It was humongous!
That class helped me quite a bit. I was able to get off Public Assistance and work as an Executive Assistant for many years. I was even able to teach my sons about computers and how to use them. They were good at it.
Starting My Own Business
Fast forward another hundred years or so, I became an Entrepreneur. I design jewelry. I sold my jewelry directly to customers through my catalogs and at street fairs and art fairs across NYC. I had even won an award from NYC for my business and received accolades from many business associations and had numerous newspaper articles written about my success.
The internet was still quite young during that time and I had heard about this Jeff Bezos guy and what he was doing on the WorldWideWeb selling books. I even bought a few books and CD’s from his Amazon platform. I thought to myself, “I need to get my business on the WorldWideWeb too.”
I wanted a website and searched for people who might be able to build one for me. Everyone wanted thousands of dollars just to build the framework and each additional thing I wanted like a shopping cart, hosting domains, or any bells and whistles I thought would make my website sing was extra. And the site wouldn’t even be owned by me. Hmph, if they learned how to build websites, so could I.
I wanted my business to have a presence on the internet too!
I decided to teach myself HTML, FTP, CGI Scripting, and Microsoft FrontPage.
I took one long very extremely hot summer from May until about the end of September, to do exactly that.
The Summer my brain left town
I don’t know how I nor my computer survived that summer. I would wake up feed my kids and sit at my computer. Pull my hair, scream into my pillow and sit back at my computer. I would get up, feed my kids lunch, scream into my bedroom pillow and sit down at my computer. I would get up, feed my kids dinner and sit back down at my computer until I could not keep my eyes open. Crawl into bed sleep a few hours to start the next day the same way. There were no beach trips, no going out, no nothing, just me and my IBM for days, weeks, and months. I think my kids hated me that summer. So many days and nights, I very seriously contemplated throwing my computer out of my 5th story bedroom window. Nightmares of it laughing at me plagued my dream-time. But….
I was finally successful at building my first website with photos, pages and even with a shopping cart attached too. The best part of all that was my sense of accomplishment and I owned it myself!
Now that I had a presence on the internet, well how was I going to market it? Eureka, moment. Go talk to some business experts!
I set up an appointment with some experts at my local SBA. They surely would be able to point me in the right direction!
Those experts shot down my idea and made me feel small for even thinking about the internet. They said that no business would be successful with an internet presence, only. I needed a brick-and-mortar store. They said the internet was a fad that would soon fade away. I left that meeting deflated since I was really feeling good about building my website all on my own. I had even had quite a few customers at the time even as far as Russia and other countries.
I set about opening a brick-and-mortar store and didn’t really pay much attention to my website after that. Ugh!!
Always follow your own intuition and guidance.
My store was located one block away from the World Trade Center. I lost it. That is another story for another day. But had I continued with my online presence the loss might not have been so devastating. Who knows where I would be today?
Look at Jeff Bezos and Amazon now!
Back to the Beginning
Funny thing. I currently work at Amazon.
And now I have an opportunity through Amazon to, guess what? Learn Web Software Development. So, basically, I am starting again from scratch this time with the backing of the company I had admired back in the day.
No Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda’s!
So, “Why did I decide to study Software Engineering?”
First of all to finish what I started oh so many years ago. I am one of those people that likes to finish; complete what they began, even if it takes a minute to circle back. I am a woman of a certain age, and there is no time like the present.
Secondly, I taught my 2 beautiful sons how to use computers and they have surpassed me by a million miles and I have to catch up.
Thirdly, so many programming languages have come into play since I first tipped my toes into the coding ocean. And as we have realized contrary to those SBA fat cats whose advice I took to heart back in the day; the internet is here to stay and will continue to evolve and grow and so will coding.
Lastly, it’s time to level up and upskill!
I am back in! Finishing what I first started. It’s 2021 the year of change. If I keep doing what I was doing, I will keep getting what I got!
