My path into the world of software development has been a circuitous one. That’s probably true for a lot of developers. I entered college like a lot of people, thinking I was going to be a doctor. As a junior in college, I decided I really wanted to take advantage of the exceptional language programs offered by the university I was attending so I declared Linguistics as my major with a minor in Italian.

Shortly after graduating, I met and married my husband and we soon had two little girls join our family. As my husband completed a degree in Information Technology, I would ask him about what he was learning and he would teach me what he happened to be working on. I liked it so much I decided to enroll myself and take a couple of computer science courses at the university. I took a C# programming course and a Web Development course. I did fine in the web development course which focused primarily on HTML, CSS, and Javascript. However, I really loved the C# course. I loved the math and logic of the language. I loved problem solving. It was satisfying to write programs that actually provided a function.

As our family grew, I decided to devote my time to raising our girls. I didn’t take any other programming courses at the university, though I did try to keep my feet wet by doing some online tutorials. I also tried to increase my understanding of hardware and software by independently studying the material covered in the A+ Certification for IT professionals.

It wasn’t until my husband finally completed his degree, and life somewhat settled down that we started discussing my career and the options for going back to school. At that point I had decided I wanted to pursue a technical career. We considered a lot of different options including bootcamps, online schools, and local universities. Ultimately, I wanted more than what a 12-week bootcamp offered but needed the flexibility of an online program. In our research, we were introduced to Bloc’s year-long, full-time program and decided it was a perfect fit for my needs.

Since enrolling in Bloc, I have re-realized the satisfaction of programming. It seems to combine my two loves from college of language and math to create valuable products and solutions. Overall, I feel that though my journey into software development has been a long time in the making, it is a journey I am just starting out and I am excited to see where it is going to take me.