I’m finally teaching myself how to code! I have wanted to (and talked about) doing this for years and decided that I’m just going to jump right into it. I am in the corporate accounting world for for my 8-6 job (let’s be real, who works a true 9-5 anymore) but wanted to do something more creative. Considering this is a huge difference from my day-to-day job, I want to document the entire process!
Middle School “Mini-Courses”
My interest for coding/computers/design started in middle school. I was in a gifted and talented program in middle school (shout-out to WAVE!). As part of our curriculum, we had “mini-courses” every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for each 9-week period. These were essentially electives ranging from learning ballroom dancing to learning how to make a quilt (which I took twice!). One of the courses offered was Photoshop. I was hooked! We learned the basics of Photoshop and how all of the tools, brushes and layers worked. Once I got the hang of it, I Photoshop’d everything! Not in the face-tuning way, but in the adding effects, color editing, text layers kind of way.
Reflection Point: These mini-courses were some of the highlights of my childhood and are why I have an interest in design and coding at all. Thank goodness for programs that encourage classes beyond STEM!
Ever since then, I have always had an interest in anything editing and creative. Unfortunately, I lost touch with that creative side, at least in the digital realm in high school. My high school “career” was filled with AP classes and dance and PALs as my electives. All of which I loved (minus a few AP classes here and there), but it didn’t give me room to pick other electives that sparked my interest. I think I was probably just “going with the flow” of high school and “doing what I was supposed to” rather than what I wanted.
College Degrees
It wasn’t until college where I was able to reconnect with the middle school interest – this time it was in the form of coding. I was enrolled in the business school at UT Austin where part of your degree is to take the introductory level classes across all majors. One of those majors included Management Information Systems, or MIS for short.
We were required to take two MIS courses: an introduction to databases and an introduction coding. The first course was fine – I think I was still learning how to college and wake up on time to make it to class (silly me and 8ams). The second course was where I felt like I thrived.
The coding course was all about…code! We learned SQL in Visual Basic. A lot of ifs and thens, validations and back-end problem solving. It felt so natural to me and just made sense. Of course if your username and password don’t match, you ain’t getting in to this website! Duh – if you don’t fill out the form completely, you ain’t buying those earrings.
That’s just how my brain worked. Very logical. Very black and white.
– Again, this formatting will be different in the future!
Why did I choose accounting, you ask? It was a solid career option and I was good at it. That and the fact that UT Austin had the #1 Master in Professional Account program in the country; so it was a pretty appealing degree. I didn’t know much about coding and what that career projection was, so erred on the side of caution and chose Accounting as my major.
Fast forward to my junior year and I was yet again presented with an opportunity to take the path less traveled (by anyone I knew). I had one more elective to fill and my friend and I chose computer science – this time JavaScript. Let me tell you – I never had more fun writing code BY HAND. I should have known by then that was my calling.
I really enjoyed that class and considered getting a computer science certificate – which would mean 15 more hours of computer science classes. At that point, I was already halfway through my MPA degree taking 15 hours each semester, had a minor in MIS (it was only one more class after the two introductory classes) and was working a part-time job. Unless I wanted to increase my course load to 21 hours, go to dance rehearsals and work each semester, it wasn’t feasible. Thinking back, I had the mentality that, “this isn’t even part of my career path, why would I spend any time doing something interest that isn’t accounting”, and so I decided it wasn’t worth it and stuck to accounting.
Grown-Up Job
After graduating UT with a Bachelors and Masters degree in Accounting and a minor in MIS, I started my grown-up job at a Big 4 public accounting job. The MPA program is set-up to where we take a short Spring semester our fourth year to intern (typically at a Big 4 company) for the first half and take accelerated classes the second half. At the end of the internship, you (hopefully) receive an offer letter for 1.5 years later after you graduate from college. Talk about a big commitment!
I was fortunate enough to receive an offer and signed it almost immediately because who doesn’t want to work for a top accounting firm and have job security, am I right?
I should also mention that I had attended a leadership conference with this firm my freshman year, did an internship with them my sophomore year, had an offer to intern with them my junior year and turned it down, then got my spring internship offer from them. So I was in pretty deep at that point!
Being in public accounting has definitely been a great learning opportunity. You get to work with incredibly smart people. You have to manage long busy season hours. But you also have an amazing vacation package (I’m talking 5 weeks of PTO, starting)! At some point during the past four years, I wanted something more creative, which is where my interest in coding came back.
There was a plethora of reasons why I didn’t start learning right away: busy season burnout, family situations, my old college-mindset, etc. It wasn’t until I started this blog and tried to edit the code, where my interest turned into action. I found myself feeling frustrated that I couldn’t make my blog look the way I wanted. I didn’t like the feeling of “not knowing” how to do something and want to change that!
My Goals
With all of that being said, I’ve made the following goals for myself:
- To be able to create my own website from A-Z and hopefully revamp this one. I’m currently blogging through WordPress as my “website builder” and am using one of their free templates. I would love to be able to code my own website from start to finish!
- Code a little bit every day! I’m going to treat this journey as learning a new language, like Spanish or French, because it essentially is! Therefore, I need to practice, practice, practice.
- Extra: Learn how to design my “brand” on Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop! This is totally for fun and not really part of coding at all. I have also been watching a lot of sticker shops on TikTok and they have inspired me.
My Next Steps
After doing some research, I have decided to learn web design basics from CodeAcademy. I looked into coding “boot camps” or online certificates, but those range anywhere from $4,000 certifications to $20,000 degrees. Considering this is a fun new hobby of mine and the internet exists, I’m option for a more affordable option.
I’m going to start out with HTML, CSS and Javascript to learn the basics. Then I’ll move into designing my own page and adding other languages.
I will be documenting what I’ve learned, my frustrations and my progress along the way! I know this process will take time, but I’m giving myself breathing room and not putting pressure on myself to learn quick. I’m going to focus on my goals and get there when I get there!
Happy coding!
Vivian
