Fantastic question!
I suppose what set the idea of learning a new skill/trade in motion is my family. My little girl, Ellie, started kindergarten in the fall and that changed everything. Despite having a degree in English, concentration in literature, and minor in Spanish, I have always worked in the restaurant industry, and still do to this day. Now with Ellie in school, I barely get to spend any time with her, because most my hours are spent working nights and weekends. Same goes for time with my amazing wife, Emily.
So what could I do?
Unfortunately, having very little foresight in my late teens and early twenties, an English degree wasn’t going to do me much good!
Well, what do I care about? What do I want to achieve?
I want to be there for my wife and daughter more, absolutely. But I also want to discover a career of which I am both proud and want to do every day!
I started to think about those questions, and when my wife, a community manager for a WeWork location here in Nashville, told me about Flatiron, I started researching the school, and what being a software engineer is all about! I realized that coding could be the tool I need to achieve several things I had always wished I could do but I never knew how. Ideas like making the world a better place through new and intuitive applications/websites that help people connect or engage with a cause that improves the lives of others. For example, how about an app that connects industries to resources found in every single home, but no one knows what do with their boxes of old junk that instead could be recycled into new products by various industries? Or, how about a site that connects people in their cities through similar interests, whenever, wherever, and allows local businesses and services to grow through those connections too?
All the sudden hundreds of passing ideas that once seemed beyond my ability to implement, now seemed possible! I could make that! This notion that I could conceive of something, and create it, sparked something inside me. Every single day since then, even just 2 weeks into the program, feeds that fire to make, to create, to change the world in some way! That’s why I want to code. Not only do I want to improve my career and my work/life balance, I want to make a real difference in the world around me, through coding!