The World Outside of Code: It Does Exist

When coding first starts overtaking your life it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking you have no skills and nothing to offer the world. While others seem to be conquering scopes and constructor functions you can sometimes feel you’ll never reach the level of even an adequate programmer. As our teacher reminded us today we all had a life before code school and those skills are still valuable.

My background is predominantly in events and marketing. While on the surface they may seem at the opposite spectrum from programming many of the problem solving and time management skills i learnt will help in my future coding endeavours. Events involved networking, pragmatic thinking and forever coming up with contigency plans on the fly. To toot my own horn here i was pretty good at my job and dealing with the never ending stress it entailed. I’m also a pretty good cook. I’ve perfected many great recipes and even refactored them (to steal a word from programming). Thinking outside the box is a skill that has transferred from my many hours of cooking to coding.

What i would like people reading this to take away is that skills acquired from all backgrounds are important when becoming a programmer. Don’t discount your life and the skills you have learnt on the road to where you are now. Be proud of them and continue to learn other skills outside of coding.