My journey into the tech world

I thought it was time to share my journey into the tech world with you, I haven't quite made it into my first tech role yet but I'm hoping my story may give others some inspiration and the mindset of my favourite saying "Just keep plodding".

Background

I'm 45 in December this year(2023), I am a full time mum to 6 children, 3 of them are mine and my husbands 3 of them are my husbands children from a previous marriage, our youngest is 4 the oldest in the house is 15, so quite an age range. I started my career after school in caring after I was told the job I wanted to do I had to be 25 before I could do it, I wanted to be a limousine driver. I was holding down 2 jobs one working nights in a care home, then a day job in a department store, needless to say my health suffered and so gave up on the dept. store. I then decided I wanted to try something new and started working in a pizza takeaway shop, at the time I was 18 and to be fair couldn't even chop a tomato, my boss told me I would never be physically strong enough to be a chef, big mistake, I proved him wrong at every turn, I learnt that business inside and out and eventually bought the business from him and ran it on my own. I was there for 14 years before getting with my now husband, which incidentally was my delivery driver way back in the year 2000, we got together as a couple in 2012 🤗, I went back to caring but 2 of my step daughters are disabled and had constant hospital appointments which were out of our area and a full day job, work wasn't very happy with the amount of time I had to take off for these appointments often at short notice, and so I decided to become a full time carer. Then along came my own children the youngest has now just started school (2023). Ironically my mum back in the early days when computers didn't save anything used to do coding, she spent hours writing code for a ball to bounce round a screen, its only when my dad said to her that when she turned the computer off all her work was lost that she decided not to pursue it. My dad in his spare time actually used to build computer tower units for his friends at computer club. Was this meant to be my destiny???

How did I start in tech

When covid hit in 2020 and we was put into our first lockdown, I was home-schooling 4 children every day and I was looking for something I could escape to at night when they had gone to bed, my husband received an email about a free coding course with amazon, it included having to type instructions to control a drone to pick up parcels and drop that at specific points on a map, then a programme to control a smart home, and a chat bot all these were done in Python, I was hooked and couldn't wait to turn the computer on at night and see what else I could learn and when I couldn't get something to go right, but then eventually did, the thrill was amazing, and I still get that buzz now, and so my journey had begun, from there I started taking courses to increase my knowledge, but lacked the direction to my learning so enrolled on the 5 day challenge with code institute, and then onto the full stack diploma, which I passed in November 2022, 5 difficult projects whilst still maintaining a home and looking after the family.

Where am I now ?

I have since took other courses including TailwindCSS and Typescript to improve my skills and knowledge, I have produced 5 articles for the Codu writing challenge, this being my 6th, I have started my first Hacktoberfest but unfortunatley have been a bit side tracked and only got one pull request merged at the moment, hopefully I will be a bit more experienced next year and will manage the four. I have kept a promise to my brother in law to do him a website for his upvc Mister t's upvc company that was made at the beginning of the diploma, I am now currently working on my own portfolio website and taking on a hackathon to try to start learning to work as developer.

Next steps

I hope to increase my knowledge, and confidence and start applying for jobs for front end development jobs, as this is where my passion lies. I aim to start taking part in regular remote hackathons to improve my experience as working with a team, I would love to do the hybrid ones, but family life is just too hectic at the moment.

Final words

My biggest aim is to show my children that hard work and dedication pays off, there is nothing you cannot do if you try and just keep plodding, its been a tough journey, I wont lie about that and yes there has been times when I have thought of just giving up, imposter syndrome has been the biggest part of my life not just with tech but everything in my life, but I have been open and honest all the way through my journey and I have people that have had my back and kept me going, if any of you are reading this you know who you are 👀🥾, my biggest support has come from my husband and my children, who truly do believe in me, as for the people who are supposed to care and said I will fail, I will get to where I want to go, determination and perseverance will get me there, so to all of you who are just starting or have hit that breaking point remember just keep plodding. Very best of luck to everyone you can do this 🙂 Thanks for reading !