What influenced and inspired you to learn how to code?

When I was in elementary school, my goal was to become a vet. I was 10, I had just gotten my first dog, Nefer, and I was just hooked.

I realized a little later that I don’t actually like every animal out there (like cats, for example) and I figured vets had to like all kinds of animals. Becoming a vet suddenly became out of the question and all my years of dressing up as a vet on Halloween was for naught.

Later in middle school, I turned my focus to biology. I was sure I wanted to become a biologist, venture into the unexplored fields of pathology and find the next great vaccine. It also didn’t hurt that my biology professor was so inspiring. 

However, in high school, biology alone felt like it had a limited scope, and so once again, I pivoted my attention to zoology (back to my love of animals) and then bioinformatics, the combination of biology and computer science. “This is where all the innovation is happening!”, I thought. 

And that would be that.

Or so I thought...

As much as I loved the field of biology (and I still do), I couldn’t actually see myself getting a bachelor’s degree in biology. 

To me, a bachelor’s in biology would equate to 4 years of drudgery involving busy work where I would be competing with a whole bunch of aspiring medical school zombie students.

Also, I was starting to resent the overall formal education system because I didn't feel the ROI was as high as it used to be.

My junior year of high school, I figured, well, why don’t I just major in computer science? It’s the other half of bioinformatics that I have little to no experience in. And once I finished my degree in CS, I could still go on to work in bioinformatics. It was a win, win!

Throughout my junior and senior year of high school, I went on a quest to learn how to code. The holy grail in question was enough programming experience to be able to fly through my freshman year in college. And fly I did. Through the learning, anyways. 

I realized after roughly a year of venturing virtually into the land of Lisp (that’s a joke), Python, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS all on my own that I LOVE CODING.

I loved feeling like this kind of digital wizard that could literally create something out of thin air (or with a good text editor).

Computer science turned into something I wanted to do for the long-term, not just this stepping stone to a career in bioinformatics.

This big change in mindset had small beginnings, but it’s changed me for the better, and I find myself delving deeper into the infinite cave that is covered with digital hieroglyphics.

There are no regrets.

I’m not looking back. 

There is no pivot. 

This post was originally written May 2nd, 2015 as part of my application for Fullstack Academy, a coding bootcamp I graduated from in the summer of 2015.