Over the past few days, there have been a few moments when I’ve realized just how much I’ve learned in the past two years, and how far I’ve come from being that girl who didn’t know what objects or classes were. Earlier this week at my job, where I’m a full-stack engineer, I started working in a completely different repository, written in a language and framework I’ve never used before (Ruby on Rails). I had to modify PostgreSQL queries (also new to me) in this repo as well as write several unit tests for my changes. The schema for the DB is extremely confusing and quite large, I have very little familiarity with Ruby and PostgreSQL syntax, and I honestly still don’t really understand why I made the change I made. But this degree has done a great job teaching me how to learn new topics/languages/frameworks very quickly, and I’m astonished to say that after deciphering multiple sets of documentation, I was able to complete this complex task! I’m finally starting to feel like a “real” software engineer.

I had a similar experience when my Capstone team and I were breaking down our project into small tasks this week. I was able to look at the project requirements and determine all of the React components we’ll need to build, what props each component will need, and the hierarchy of the components. I knew what queries each component would need to make to our API, and I knew how to design our API routes and DB queries. I thought about how we could make our queries as generic as possible so that each query could be used in multiple scenarios and we could reduce the amount of code we’ll have to write. I knew how to use a database hosted on Google Cloud. I knew how we could deploy the project on Google Cloud. The only task that really intimidated me was implementing authentication, but even still, I’ve implemented authentication before and I’m sure I can do it again. Nothing in this project scared me. Although this will definitely be the most complex project I’ve worked on, I felt completely prepared.

Apologies if I sound like I’m bragging or trying to pretend like I know everything. I totally do not know everything! I’m sure we’ll hit snags along the way that I didn’t think about, and I’m sure I’ll have some moments where I look back at my initial plan and wonder what the heck I was thinking. But really, I just think it’s so cool to compare myself now to where I was two years ago. I used to think I couldn’t get to where I am today. I used to think that I wasn’t cut out for coding. I looked at my friends who were already software engineers and told myself that my brain just didn’t work like theirs. And yet, here I am, doing the dang thing! And not just doing it but doing it WELL! I spent a long time thinking I wasn’t smart enough, logical enough, or even determined enough to be who I am today. I’ve never been happier to be proven wrong.