Something new is happening...

On Monday, two days from now, I begin classes at Ada Developer's Academy (ADA). While I cannot tell you how excited I am, I can tell you that I've looked at my acceptance email every week since April just to verify that I was accepted. This is despite the fact that I've been to study sessions and have been completing homework assignments for months. After a year and a half of teaching myself to code in my spare time, I get to be in a community of like-minded people who for whatever reason, decided to change up their career by going back to school for another year. It feels life-changing, but it also feels like my head is going to hurt a lot.

To backtrack for just a moment, ADA is a software developer school for women and non-binary people located here in lovely Seattle. It is named after the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace. Half of my year will be spent attending classes, the other half I will be interning with an engineering team at a tech company and preparing my final project. I'm definitely already contemplating project ideas.

One of the coolest things is that I get my own mentor who has decades of experience as an engineer. We met for the first time last week and it was such a impactful moment for me to be able to talk to someone in the industry about my goals during and after ADA. I talked about the Pokemon Go app and asked about how engineering teams are structured in a company. And I get that it may sound silly or random, but asking for advice/help from an engineer in real life or otherwise -- as someone who has been learning from online resources -- is intimidating. I've worried about appearing too novice, not knowing enough, and getting an answer that is way above my comprehension level that I turn red and run away. But having a mentor who believes in promoting diversity in the tech industry enough to offer his time, makes the process easier. I'm grateful to have someone on my team who can point me in the right direction and offer a point of view I normally wouldn't have access to. It makes the end goal of becoming an engineer that much more tangible.

I moved to Seattle in the hope of making a better life for myself than the one I left behind. It's been wonderful living in the Pacific Northwest, but it's also been incredibly hard working nightshift at an admin job for the past three years. For the first time in a long time, I get to dedicate my full-time occupation to one of my passions: coding. It's going to be amazing. I cannot wait.