Why Software?

It was 2010. I was 11 years old, and had just watched “The Social Network”. Which for those who don’t know is the origin story of Facebook and how Mark Zuckerberg came to be. I instantly fell in love with the movie and thought that coding and building something like Mark did was so interesting. Right then and there I went on my parents newly purchased iMac and found a walk through YouTube video on how to build a replica “Flappy Bird” iPhone app, which has since been taken off the app store. I went through and copied line by line each line of code that the video walked through until the app was fully functional! To be honest, I don’t think I retained one line of code in my brain. That day, there was a seed planted deep in my head, and it was forgotten about.

Fast forward 10 years, I am enrolled at Penn State University with an intended major of Electrical Engineering. Which to be honest, I really didn’t even know what an Electrical Engineer actually did. I studied that for about a year, and then my uncle, who is a tech giant, suggested that I try my hand at a technology degree. So I took my first programming class learning C# and excelled in that class! That next summer, I landed a Front End Engineer Internship at HCA Healthcare in Nashville, TN, working in the User Experience department. I had no front end knowledge going into that internship, so that summer I got very familiar with HTML & CSS and learned it pretty well. I wanted more. I wanted to build full stack web applications, and I wanted to do it well. College wasn’t teaching me web development, so thats when I found Flatiron. A program that taught a tech stack which would fully satisfy my endeavors in web development. Two days into the Software Engineering program and I have enjoyed working through the labs. I am excited to continue to work through the program and join the tech industry as a Software Engineer!