Why I decided to pursue Software Engineering
Wow! Just wrapping up my second week at the Flatiron school and it has been a whirlwind. Four months ago I couldn’t even begin to tell you what coding entailed. What is this Ruby? Some buried treasure off of a Caribbean island somewhere? Fast forward to today and I’m using this language to solve complex labs. The work is hefty and I still feel like I have a long way to go, but I do feel like I’m started to gain the integral knowledge needed to become an efficient software engineer.
Before deciding to take this life-changing step, I was working in-house at a TV post-production facility in NYC as a sound engineer and composer. I’ve always tended to gravitate towards technical roles. Then wop! Global pandemic alert.
The pandemic definitely forced me to switch gears, but it also steered me into a direction that I’ve always been fascinated with but never had the chance to explore further: Tech. I believe there is a lot of overlap with music composition and digital infrastructure. Building layers to achieve a certain effect and trial, and error are major tenets of music programming and composition. My brother in law has worked in tech for over 20 years at places like Prodigy, Google, and Yahoo and he has been a major inspiration for me. He has preached the benefits of FOSS and the open-source community, ideologies that I resonant with and find very appealing. Through him, I saw how exciting the tech world can be, how it’s a community that evolves forward standing on the shoulders of their pioneers and constantly changing. I found out about the Flatiron program through him and was instantly motivated to get started in learning software engineering. I would love to find a way to integrate all of my skills with my learning. Working at a place like Spotify or Apple Music, or any multi-media platform somewhere down the line would be like throwing me into the proverbial briar patch.
As the class descends into Object-Oriented programming, I am amazed at the metaphorical nature of code and abstraction. There is a certain philosophy behind this field that I find very appealing. As a philosophy buff, I find a lot of similarities between Hegel’s “idealism” and OOP. That might be a stretch but hey, I’m going with it! The more I dig in, the more excited I become about coding and the possibilities afterward.
