If you’re like me, for a great part of your life you’ve thought of ‘coding’ as this magic science that is very tedious and calculated. When you think of a professional programmer, even though you have good friends who are developers, you still think of someone who spends a lot of time inside and alone – because that is what the projects require… right? Well, I have been on a quest to demystify programming since before I knew that was possible.

I never knew it was possible, but one poolside afternoon, I decided to start asking questions to a friend of mine who just finished his Computer Science Engineering degree. I started with how do coding languages exist and how do they interact, and we got all the way to how computers work and the history of programming. He is incredibly intelligent and though I might have only retained 30% of that conversation, his insistence that I wouldn’t leave being able to freely say that “computers are magic” was so important and kicked off the summer of myth-busting.

One of the most interesting things that I learned was that Computer Programming very much started as a “women’s job” in the 1960’s. Planning, scheduling, and organizing + secretarial work were seen as feminine jobs that came naturally to women. Of course, this devolved to where we are today with less than 25% of ANY computing positions being held by women on the job market. Though I am a proud feminist, the temptation to fight gender norms alone is not enough to inspire a career change. But I will always stay curious

Fast forward to working with Besa. I begin to ask more questions and learn more about how our internal software development works from the standpoint of Bryan, who has been our lead developer from the start and Zack, who has been here about as long as I have.

Eventually, I had a coffee meeting with Zack to learn more about his experience being a developer on many different sized teams and projects. I was able to ask even more very specific questions about what programming looks like from typing to launching and how multiple people can even work on a single project at once. The thing Zack spoke about that resonated with me the most was that being a developer does not have to mean working alone for long periods of time to deliver a product that only you know how to build. Being a developer can and should be collaborative, innovative, and iterative. “Some people think programming is just where nerds go off into their nerd-hole by themselves, but

“…people who are good problem solvers actually make the best developers”

And then the world stopped.

Just kidding, it was not at all that dramatic. But I did take a moment to recognize that I claim problem-solving as one of my most marketable skills and tried to internalize that for a moment. The biggest motivation barrier for me to finish any of my online coding classes was not thinking I would be good at coding once I learned the language, or not knowing what to do with it next.

Just this afternoon, myself and another Besa team member, Frances, were able to take Zack up on an offer to have a mini pair-programming workshop to solve a basic problem in Ruby. I had begun learning Ruby and Javascript on my own but being able to see it in a true problem-solving capacity was pretty motivating for me.

So thanks to everyone who has helped me on this journey by tolerating my endless questions and deep internal processing of your answers. I am suddenly empowered to learn some new skills with the goal of being able to collaborate better with “the tech side” of my teams in the future and maybe to be able to contribute a bit myself.

Wish me luck on finishing my goals of learning Ruby before the summer is over and getting my little sister to go to a coding boot camp before middle school.

Oh, and female developers: You’re next.

Thanks for reading. – Emily