Two years ago, I decided to radically change my career from nonprofit STEM education to software engineering. I had no background in coding, outside of a single programming class in 7th grade and a little HTML when I was a teenager. I entered a coding bootcamp, Ada Developers Academy, in January 2018 and had full-time software engineering offers from two of Seattle’s tech giants in December of the same year. Being a nontraditional Black female software engineer, preparing for the interview process began as a terrifying and mysterious endeavor. Through much
During the earliest stages of my nontraditional software engineering education, I would often sit down to code and place my computer on a table covered with books of poetry. I loved coding but drew my power and sustenance as a Black woman from the words of poets like Jamila Woods, Jericho Brown, and Fatimah Asghar. The apparent contradiction between my interests always left me with a tiny itch, somehow, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what the feeling was trying to tell me. I went on improving my coding skills while
