Why Software Engineering?
As a millennial growing up in the 90’s, it’s easy to think software engineering and computer sciences are our bloodlines. Our birthrights. Our destiny. Indeed, we are the generation old enough to remember floppy disks, the original Netscape Navigator, the cringey whines of dial up modems, yelling at your parents, “I’M ONLINE!”, whenever they picked up the landline to make a phone call. The deeper we got, the more time we spent in front of those screens, with mouse and keyboard in hand.
At least, that’s how it was for me.
As far back as I can remember, computers were what I “did”. It probably started early on when my parents enrolled me in the local library’s “Cyber Kids” program, which taught kids the basics of the internet, navigating websites and how to type with proper form. Things escalated quickly when we bought AOL, and suddenly a whole new world of chat rooms, message boards and the dark world of “punters” (applications used to kick chatroom users “offline” via html string overload) were suddenly at my fingertips, coinciding with my juvenile sixth grade need to misbehave.
But it wasn’t all doom and gloom.
As I matured, I picked up a fair bit of html basics here and there to update my Xanga and MySpace pages. My typing speed even increased (over 140 WPM at one point!), and I continued to spend more time on the computer day in day out chatting with friends over Instant Messenger, and learning about new things like philosophy and discovering music in languages I’ve never spoken, all before the “YouTube Rabbit Hole” even existed.
Yet somehow, computers were always just a means to an end; Connecting with friends, learning and researching new things. It never occured to me that one could actually build those programs and websites, let alone make that their profession or career.
Fast forward 20 years to present day: I’m now an Operations Analyst at an e-commerce website, and my manager asks me to take a look at a Java based program he’s working on to automate manual processes. He hits the “Play” button and suddenly, like magic, his browser begins to mimic human interaction with the company website. Typing and filling out fields, clicking on buttons, navigating to different pages. My eyes light up and I ask, “How did you do that?”. “It’s easy,” he fibs, “you can learn it too with some work”. And thus began my foray into code.
As an Operations Analyst, problem solving and rolling out process improvements through any tool available to you is part of the job. I struggled for a few days cobbling together code based on that first script my manager shared with me to navigate my browser to “www.google.com”. Eventually, as my knowledge base grew and the tasks got more complex, I found more ways to apply my new skill sets; Scraping data from websites, creating scripts for quality assurance, page template building, formatting Excel files, etc.
It was only when I found myself finding every excuse to write code all day that I realized, “This is what I want to do; This is what I enjoy doing”. With the right support system in place, and a growth mindset encouraged by my manager and peers, I finally found my passion for code and software engineering.
