A Road Less Taken: My Journey into Software Development

I didn’t start my career aspirations in software. In fact, I had no idea what software development was until much time after I graduated from Sacramento State with a degree in Psychology.

I completed my first degree in 2010, two years removed from one of the largest recessions in the United States and was working temporary administrative positions in the San Francisco Bay Area to get a sense of what the working world was like. I am a first generation college graduate in my immediate family and at the time of entering the workforce I had no idea what an office job truly entailed. However lost I may have been in my working life, the same could not be said for my non-career related pursuits.

During my time in high school through college I found some small time success as a musician, starting in local bands and moving onto getting signed by a record label that hosted some very successful acts, including Yellowcard – a band responsible for the mega-hit “Ocean Avenue” that dominated MTV and the radio back in the mid-2000’s. As a lead guitar player who started by learning some Third Eye Blind songs in their bedroom, this was a dream come true. As for most guitar players, we are embarked on a never-ending quest for “the perfect tone” – the sound we achieve through a combination of our guitar, our amplifier, and our actual playing style. Around 2009 I took that quest to the next level – I decided I wanted to build an amplifier so tuned to my tastes that I would never need to buy an amplifier again. I purchased a wonderful amp build kit made by a company that specialized in recreating a classic guitar amplifier first developed back in the 1960’s.

I’ll be honest, I was nervous to even start building the kit after it arrived. Between college and my college job, it took me a few weeks to even set up a work space that I felt comfortable in. I didn’t even know how to solder until my uncle had the free time to teach me. After many stressful days and nights of soldering, melting wires, buying more solder and wires and other replacement parts I melted, I was finally left with a finished amplifier that rivaled the Rock Gods of days past. Keep in mind – this is the first time I had ever really built anything that was more complicated than dinner, from the ground up. Other than one minor hiccup where I discovered I needed to switch one resistor for another, it worked flawlessly, and the sound – oh the sound was heavenly. The articulation of the guitar tone coming from the speakers, and the amplifiers reaction to my playing style was exactly what I was looking for. To this day I continue to tweak this amplifier to meet my needs and it still sounds incredible all this time later.

After the peak of my musician days had ended and after working many temporary positions to get my footing in San Francisco, I finally landed a full-time position working as a Benefits administrator at a very well known software and data management company. At the time my goal was to work at a job that helped people, and working in benefits seemed like a natural field for me to be in. But I’ll be completely honest – although I knew what I was doing for my job, I had no idea what the company I was working for actually does to generate revenue! In addition, every day I was interacting with a countless number of individuals who had titles that were completely foreign to me, like “Senior Software Engineer”, “DevOps Specialist”, and “Data Scientist”. As I am a naturally curious person I felt in order to be successful at my job I needed to understand what our company actually does so I can understand the audience of people I would be assisting day in and day out. As soon as I typed “What is software development” and “What is programming” into the Google search bar, I was fascinated.

I soon discovered a new online learning platform called Coursera, which at the time offered free courses from real universities to learn undergrad style programming courses. Initially I hesitated to enroll – from what I could tell from my searches was computer science and programming was hard and not for everyone. In addition, between parents and friends I was told it was basically not possible for someone like myself to be a success in software development because I lacked any previous exposure to it, and the folks who work at my company are gifted and therefore they have the means to be in software development.

What these individuals forgot is I am a stubborn man, I am persistent, and although I may feel nervous taking on a new hobby, I don’t give up easy. I thought to myself: “Well, if I can put together a guitar amplifier that houses up to 500 volts DC and I didn’t get myself killed in the process of building it, I bet I could learn some of this programming stuff.” I enrolled in the Python class from the University of Michigan on Coursera and I found myself staying at work way past my working hours to get through it. I was enthralled, especially by the idea that I could learn some of the basics to make the administrative overhead part of my job less time consuming – and if I did a good enough job, maybe I could make my co-workers jobs easier too!

Soon I was building small running programs for myself and my coworkers and fortunately enough I had an extremely supportive manager who encouraged this behavior and skillset. Primarily the manager wanted the team to be a success day-in and day-out, and we were demonstrating that a few of the small programs I built were actually helping us prevent smaller issues from boiling into major ones that would typically stop the manager’s entire day. Eventually I was noticed by the Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS) team for both my work, my can-do self-learning attitude, and my collaborative and friendly personality, and I made the switch from Benefits to the HRIS team to allow me to get closer to the internal products the company was building to accomplish administrative tasks for the company’s Human Resources organization.

Seeing my software endeavors at work come to fruition, I enrolled into an Associates Degree program for Computer Science and received a 4.0 GPA upon finishing the AS degree. And now as I type this, I’ll soon be finishing the Post-Baccalaureate Computer Science program at Oregon State. Where this leads to remains to be seen, but I like to think if I hadn’t built that amplifier – where would I be today?