What Inspired You to Want to Become a Developer?

About this Episode

Today we talking about what inspired us to get into software development and become developers.

Transcript:

MIKE: Welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike. I will be hosting today. We've got a panel here today of Afton, Diane, Eddy, Ramses, and Tad with me. And today, we're going to be talking about what inspired us to get into software development, what inspired us to become a developer. I have the luxury as the host [laughs] of being able to share my story first.

I've been thinking about, as we've been preparing for this, what I might share, and I'm going to start back in childhood. And I may have shared this before, but I will share it again. When I was in elementary school, I don't remember quite what grade it was, like, second or third grade; our school got a computer. And this was a long time ago [laughs], back where the school would have a computer. And that was a big deal. We didn't have one at home. I'd seen computers at places of work but had not had a chance to play with one.

And our school got a computer, and I got to use Logo, which is a language, if anybody has used, that lets you move a little turtle around the screen and draw lines behind it. And I thought it was just the coolest thing to be able to talk to this computer and have it do something. And what I particularly remember is that there was some sort of key sequence or something you could do to go to a back channel where it wouldn't show you the turtle, but you could write a little script. And then you could execute the script, and you could watch the turtle do a few things. I remember you could make spirals, and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

And you'd have the turtle go forward and then turn and then go forward again if you did it with the right angles. You could do it in a loop. There was some sort of looping construct. I don't remember what the looping constructs were. But I just thought it was like the coolest thing, and I wished I could do it all the time.

There was another kid at the school who was really good at doing this. I remember he used BASIC. And he inspired me. That's kind of a tragic story because he went on to be criminally prosecuted for a murder related to a drug transaction. But maybe that kind of pushed me away from it for a while. But there were other people around me who got computers, and kind of inspired me as well.

Later when I was a few years older in junior high, my family got a computer which was, wow, it's a big deal. [laughs] And it was, I think, an i386. It came with a book for GW-BASIC, so it comes with BASIC, which is a simple programming language. And there was a manual along with guides on how to do a bunch of things. And I read through the manual cover to cover and did some of these example programs, and I had a great time. I would spend hours working on that.

I had this from my childhood, and then I didn't really work on it for a few years. Again, as I mentioned, [laughs] my friend who had some interest in it went down a dark path. I kind of got away from it. And then, when I was in college, I was originally pursuing botany and genetics, molecular biology, and I got kind of scared off by that field because I didn't feel very comfortable with the lack of ethical constraints, what was going on. I'm kind of glad I got out of that industry because there are some ethical conundrums there that are challenging, but they are in every field, so I don't think it's escapable.

But then, in college, I was looking for what I wanted to do instead, and I took a coding class kind of on a whim. And I was like, oh, that's right, I loved this. [laughs] And I thought I could make a career out of this, and this would be a great career. And I never really looked back. I've been doing it ever since. And I've been coding full-time for over 20 years now. I've really enjoyed it.

There is a joy and a thrill in being able to solve problems and get this computer to do something productive and useful that is hard to explain to people who haven't done it. If you haven't done it, I recommend you try. Have that experience for yourself. That's kind of my background, what inspired me to become a developer. I could talk about more, but that's kind of the big picture of my progress. What are your stories?

TAD: I started out back in the early '80s. Texas Instruments decided that they wanted to get into this new home PC thing. And they came out with a computer called the TI-99/4A, and my parents got one for our family for Christmas. And it was just fascinating to me. There were these clunky things where everything was kind of contained in this keyboard that you plugged into your TV and that you use as your monitor. And then you got games or other things that came on cartridges that you'd slide in the slot in the front. And it booted up, and you'd play the games and do whatever.

But when you first started it up, it gave you an option screen; number one was basically programming BASIC, and number two was the option to boot up whatever cartridge you had put in. And for a while, I just kind of ignored option one. But then I was kind of like, well, what is this thing, you know, programming BASIC? [laughs] So I started choosing option one, and I'm like, oh, I could do line numbers in a loop because it came with a little manual you could read and figure it out.

And so I started out with the really simple stuff like the guess the number games or doing a loop like you are awesome and just prints it over and over again, whatever. And I did that for a while. Probably the height was I came up with a song, and I programmed the computer to play the song in a very electronic way. And I recorded it, and I submitted that for the Reflections contest. And everyone thought that was so novel. I made it up to region or something. And I'm like, yeah, computers and computer music and stuff.

But I think I kind of followed your path, Mike, where that was really cool when I was younger, and then I kind of fell away from it because there were other things to do. And I didn't get into computers again until probably high school because I had a lot of friends in the computer club. My computer science teacher in high school was kind of a visionary, I think, because she...this was back in '93, '92. And she was connected to this...the computers at the college were connected to this new thing called the World Wide Web.

This new thing like FTP [laughs] would be able to connect to that, and from there, we were connecting to the world, and this was back in '92. And we're like, whoa, what is this? And she was doing things like video conferencing. And it was like grainy, little black and white things. And we used HyperCard to control the LaserDisc player that she had. And it was pretty crazy. And that, I think, really reignited my interest in computers and computer science. And I was the vice president of the computer science club and getting into that.

But my real passion in high school was chemistry. And I got like a five on the AP chemistry test. I was just doing awesome things with chemistry. I got a scholarship in chemistry and got into the University of Utah. And I was sure that that was my path; that was what I was going to do. But once I got into college, I realized I really enjoyed learning chemistry. And I really enjoyed the fun things like blowing things up or making soap or whatever little projects that you do. But I really didn't enjoy the long-term labs. I didn't enjoy the reports. I didn't enjoy sticking samples in machines and writing reports, that kind of thing.

But I had all this chemistry, and I'm like, well, I don't want to lose the credit for that. Maybe if I switch over to something kind of parallel, I'll find my passion; I'll find what I want to do. So I switched over to materials engineering and was doing that. I wasn't loving it, but they promised us the third quarter is when they get into the real stuff, like the real stuff that you're going to learn about and do in materials engineering.

So I stuck it out. I took the third-quarter class, and I hated it. I don't know, like, it was so boring to me because a lot of it was stick a sample in the machine, collect the data, write a 20-page report, literally 20 pages. And we were doing that every week. I'm like, ah, this isn't what I want to do. And I kind of got bummed out and decided to just drop out for a while because my reasoning was, why pay money to do something that I don't enjoy?

And so I took a bit of time off to just go home, get a job, figure it out. And it was interesting because I was out mowing my parents' front yard, and one of my old high school teachers came by, and she actually mentioned she's like, "Oh, I thought you were going to go into computer science. That was what you really seemed to be passionate about back when I was teaching that stuff." And I'm like, oh yeah, [laughs] I kind of was. And I had been doing a computer science minor the whole time.

And it just dawned on me; I'm like, those were the classes I really liked. Those are the things I really enjoyed doing. Why don't I just make up my mind on my major and go back to college? And being able to take your thoughts and make them into something and just be able to create anything you want, just the variety and the things you get to learn and the things you get to do with computers turned out to really appeal to me. And so that's how I kind of switched paths. I went back, got my CS degree, and I've been doing this for, gosh, somewhere about 16, 17 years, I think.

MIKE: Nice.

AFTON: I'm really eager to kind of talk about my story now because it's quite a different path. I grew up with zero interest in computer [laughs] programs and, in fact, being very intimidated when I had to interact with computers. Occasionally, I was shown how to play a game on there. And in school, I knew how to get to my Word documents to type my papers, but that was it. I did not do any more than was absolutely necessary involving computers. And I knew nothing about programming and just had very limited exposure to anything of that sort.

And my passions were nature and dancing, and I was highly involved in music and theater. And I ended up...in school, I started out as a math major because I really had always loved math, and then switched to music and got my degree in music. And my favorite part about my music experience was the music theory, which was very mathematical, very exacting. I loved learning about how notes related to each other and the different sounds you can make by tweaking. And if you followed certain patterns and certain rules, you could create something beautiful. I loved that exactness and learning those little tools and the rules for creating something.

After I graduated, I started a family and stayed at home raising and homeschooling my kids and almost never interacted with computers except online, whatever. But there came a time where I needed to start a career. And I was looking for a way to gain some independence and support myself and something that would give me some flexibility because I had young kids and wanted something that could work with my life in some way. I had some people really close to me who had gone through QA and were then web developers and software developers, and them knowing me, they were like, "You should try development, writing code. I think you would like it. I think it's up your alley."

And I really resisted that idea. I was just like, no way. Computers, programs, I mean, I know nothing about that world. And so for at least two years, I was just like, no, that's not my thing. And I thought about going back to school to become a dance teacher or maybe going back to school to pursue biology more, which had been my minor.

But when it came down to it, I was thinking about, well, if I go back to school and invest a ton of money and a ton of time, that's one path to finding a way into a career. Or is there something I could do from home while I'm homeschooling my kids that I have time and maybe not as much money resources to pour into? Is there something I could do that I can give it time and less money? [laughs]

And so finally, in 2015, when I was in my mid-30s, I decided to find a free coding course online and take my first coding course. It was on Codecademy, and I took HTML and CSS. And it was so much fun seeing how I could type something, and then it did something on this screen visually, and I could play with it. It blew my mind how much fun it was. [laughs]

Over a couple of years, I dabbled with some various basically free courses that I could find online. There were so many resources. It was really incredible what I was able to find and do. And also my local library...I went to the library, and I browsed the software books, and I found one on Ruby on Rails by Head First. And so I checked out that book, and I went through it like I was doing school like a textbook, and I built my first Ruby (It wasn't Ruby on Rails; it was just Ruby.) application.

So about two, two and a half years in, I put my children into public school so that I could spend full-time basically schooling myself and learning how to write code and solve problems. I just thought it was really intriguing and super fun to have a problem I had to solve and to just have to chase it down, and search, and Google, and read documentation, and try to figure out how to build an app. And I found the problem-solving and the investigation just really thrilling. And it was just like a treasure hunt every day with a new problem I had to solve. [laughs]

So I guess I just found a lot of joy and intrigue in the problem-solving and thought; I do love this, and I seem to have skills that help me be successful. I'm persistent, and I love the nitty-gritty details of everything and finding out what I do can impact various things, and just really enjoyed it. So I jumped into the world as a summer intern for my first job, and that's still what I'm doing.

So largely, my motivators were finding something I could do that could help me to gain some independence financially. It's something that can support life, a well-paying job, and something that was intriguing and interesting that I could love. It was a surprise to me. And I was encouraged to try out this world, but it surprised me. And it's been a fun journey. I'm still learning every day what skills I can bring and learning as I go.

MIKE: There was something I was noticing, Afton. You said that your background was a lot different. But you notice that nobody who's spoken thus far started their career saying, "Yes, I'm going to go and build software." [laughs]

AFTON: [laughs]

MIKE: None of us. We started in something else, and for whatever reason, that wasn't the end of our journey. And then we went to coding either for the first time or went back to it and, like, wait, this is great. That moment of discovery when you can work with the computer and it does things that you say sparked something. It's interesting to me how much commonality there is between all of our stories so far. The specific year we happened to start, I'm going to argue, is not that relevant, [laughs] rather that we weren't there, and then we got into it. That's cool.

EDDY: I'd be lying if I didn't admit that a huge contributing factor for choosing this was the salary ceiling is much higher than most after a few years. That was a huge factor. I remember I took a small typing class in junior high which, by the way, in hindsight, [laughs] has paid huge dividends with programming, like, holy cow. I can be much more efficient typing what I want and stuff. So I don't know if knowing how to type is essential or if people require that as a skill, but it was fantastic.

But that class that I took, the teacher implemented a small HTML course to kind of fill in time gaps throughout our typing sessions. And we were able to change the color of text on the screen from black to red. I still remember I was like, what the heck? I got filled with joy, and I was like, dang, I was able to tell the browser what to do with a few lines of code. I was like, this is insane. I remember feeling super joyful in that, and I was like, dang, this is really cool.

But it ultimately was a hobby for a while, and even after high school, I didn't have much direction for what I wanted my career to be. And then, it wasn't until the pandemic hit pretty hard in 2020 and I realized that I have a small family that relies on my income. And I was mortified that I was going to lose my job; fortunately, I didn't. But that was a huge epiphany for me that I needed a specific skill that will prove to be more flexible and provide better job security.

Then I remembered that I found coding pretty fun and entertaining. So I spent most of my time at my job at the time during lunch...I boot up my computer, and I just downloaded an IDE, and I just began self-learning with videos and stuff. And I delved into the React framework I remember. I looked up what are the most high-demand languages, and React was pretty popular. And I'm like, sure, I'll pick it up. There were even times where I was on the clock, and I whipped out my phone and I watched videos. And I hit a point where I dreaded the job that I had. And I really decided to take it seriously.

I remember I tried going back to college. But first of all, I'm not very academic, and I ended up dropping out after the first semester. But I remember I spoke with someone there, and they told me, "Yo, you don't need a college degree. Going the academic route isn't really for everyone. You don't necessarily need to." And I was like, wait, you can be a developer without a degree? That's insane. That made me wonder, like, what?

But I joined Reddit forums and a lot of blogs and watched a lot of videos. And a lot of people were like, "Oh yeah, you can totally penetrate the industry," so that's what I did. And after three months of really, really being heads down with learning and being motivated, I shot a Hail Mary, and I applied at Acima for the QA position. Matt Rampey was the team lead at the time, so if he happens to hear this, hello. And I guess he really liked the motivation and hunger to really penetrate the industry and really aspire to self-learn.

So now I've been employed for about a year and a half. And I've been striving to push myself to get out of my comfort zone and, pick up backlog tickets, reach out to developers. [laughs] I was like, hey, like, help me out. And I attribute a lot of my success thus far because I've paired with most of you with tickets, and I attribute a lot of my success to you guys because of all the patience that you've demonstrated up till now.

MIKE: That's great. [laughs] And we love having you working with us too. I'm going to point out to our listeners again the commonality here. [laughs] Notice that nobody really knew they were going to do this right at the beginning, and then they discovered it and noticed how much joy it brought them. Thanks, Eddy.

DIANE: I guess what sparked my interest and my curiosity was a class I took in high school, I believe. It was computer science one. And I took it because it was just a class to fill in. And the teacher introduced us to Scratch just to make your own little game on it, and we did that for the whole entire year. We just mainly focused on that. And if I'm being honest, at first, it didn't really catch my attention or anything like that. I wasn't very interested.

And so as the course went on, it was really fascinating and really cool to create your own games, seeing how all the motions and the integrations that they had within Scratch. You could just make the game on there. After taking that class, I believe it was my senior year; I totally forgot about it, scratched it out, literally. [chuckles] And I went to school for marketing initially. And I went for about three years, so I almost graduated, but then I realized it wasn't something I wanted to do.

So I took a long break and I started working at Acima as a processing agent. And after being in the processing department for a bit, I decided I wanted to go to a coding bootcamp. And from that, I got inspiration from someone who I look up to, and she's more of a big sister to me. So she went to a coding bootcamp, and seeing her go through that and excel in that coding bootcamp and excel in her career after really inspired me to go.

So I went through the coding bootcamp and actually reached out to Afton after I had finished the coding bootcamp. And we did some pairing after work hours, and it was really great. And I was able to learn a lot. And then she let me know that there was a QA position opening up, so I decided to take the chance and reached out to Ryan, who then interviewed me. And that's where I am now. I didn't think I was going to really excel in the career, but yeah, here we are.

MIKE: One thing I noticed is you mentioned there was somebody who was like a big sister to you who inspired you to go forward. Afton, you've mentioned that you had a couple of friends who said, "Hey, you should try this." Tad, you said you had a teacher, a former [laughs] teacher who remembered you and inspired you, and I probably have overlooked. There's a pattern here of people being inspired by somebody. Am I picking up on this accurately that there was a mentor who made a real difference to you?

DIANE: Yeah, she actually also worked here for a bit. So she actually got me the processing role and then pushed me to pair with Afton. [laughs] So yeah, she is the one who really pushed me to do the stuff that I am right now.

MIKE: Oh, that's great. I know I've worked with a number of people who are just starting their careers. I'm thinking of somebody...I don't want to name somebody who can't be here and speak for themselves, but there was somebody who was just working at a front desk. I say just working, but it was kind of a demanding position because she was the executive assistant and did all of the [laughs] coordination of the company, but she was not doing a technical role.

And she came and joined me and some other developers for a mentoring session during lunches, kind of like what Eddy was saying. She just came and joined us during lunches, and we took our time during lunch to start teaching her what we were doing and let her pair with us and review our code. And she ended up some years later working here at Acima and has gone on, and she's leading a department at another company. Seeing that is immensely gratifying as a mentor.

Actually, one of my really good friends in high school went into civil engineering. And he had kind of gotten stagnant in his career and asked if I would take a few days and teach him and some of his co-workers a class on coding and kind of get them started into it, not as much as a bootcamp. Imagine a really compressed bootcamp; learn how to code in a week kind of thing. It's not enough to completely launch your career but enough to spark their interest. And my friend is now working at a software company and has been for a number of years. That changed his career.

Just a couple of examples of the little things you can do, just taking some time during lunch or taking a week to teach a class ended up changing the trajectory of somebody else's career. So we're talking a lot now about our time as the mentees, the people who were inspired. But the work that we do, even if it's just a little bit to help somebody else in their career, can make a huge difference.

TAD: I think it's interesting. I had to write a paper in college, and so I chose to write about why and how people get into development and things like that, and often, it's two things, someone has to have access to a computer and be able to interact in some way that sparks their interest. And then they also need someone to mentor them, or push them, or notice them, and put them on the path. Those are two things that people usually point to as what set them on the path.

As you were talking, I was thinking I know this person who used to be an accountant, so they used Excel all the time. And they're like, "Oh, man, I wish I could make this easier on myself." And so they started learning formulas, and they started learning macros, and they started learning these things. And they're like, "Oh, man, [laughs] I like this better than accounting. How do I do this?" And happened to have lots of friends that were all devs, and they were like, "Oh, you probably would like this." And suddenly, they're a developer now.

MIKE: That's really cool.

RAMSES: Funny enough, Tad, that's not exactly how I started, but before being a full-time developer and before I was in technical support, I was in more of an auditing position where I used spreadsheets quite a bit. And filling out spreadsheets manually it's really, really tedious, or processing information on a spreadsheet can be really tedious. So I spent a lot of time researching and learning how to automate some of the really repetitive tasks that I was doing, and that kind of got me interested.

I've always been kind of around computers because I was first exposed to computers when I was in elementary school, probably. And I played a lot of games, video games growing up. So I was always solving puzzles or doing quests in games. It sparked my interest in problem-solving. But once I joined a technical support role, I think that kind of drove my interest into development quite a bit because in my technical support role here at Acima, I would often do QA tasks, or I was starting to do more development work because I was always just around code.

So it was a good opportunity for me to just learn what was happening. And I was really curious in obtaining that knowledge, and I still am today. I spend a lot of my time learning new things and trying to be more efficient, trying to just push myself. That's what inspires me today is just getting better.

MIKE: That's cool that you were in Excel also. I remember thinking it was cool to write formulas in a spreadsheet, [laughs] the spreadsheet software I was using. This was before there was...so this was...a little hard to think about this way, but there used to be command-line spreadsheets, terminal-type spreadsheets. It would fill your screen, but it was very different than the graphical environment we have today, but it worked just the same. [laughs] They'd have keyboard shortcuts that you'd tend to use more rather than using your mouse, but otherwise, the experience really hasn't changed that much. [laughs] And I loved that. I really liked writing the formulas.

I also remember doing some computer-aided drafting in AutoCAD, and there's some scripting you can do there as well that I didn't do a lot of, but I guess it was quite sophisticated. And it was also interesting and fun. I guess I didn't really perceive that as coding. I think a lot of people have that same experience.

We thought, oh yeah, coding, that's just kind of something you do for fun. It's kind of an enjoyable part of the job. This isn't something you can make a career of. It turns out, yes, it is, and it's in high demand. We need people [laughs] who can do that. Anybody else have those experiences doing bits of code in places that you wouldn't necessarily think of as coding at the time?

TAD: I think it's interesting. I believe this is true that pretty much all Adobe products now let you do script stuff with JavaScript. And I know some designers who started off just, oh, gosh, I need to automate these tasks. These things I'm doing in Photoshop or Illustrator, whatever, are really repetitive. [laughs] I wish I could automate this stuff, or I wish I could figure out a way to save this file in three different formats so I can give it to whoever and didn't have to do that manually.

And they don't necessarily become full-on developers, but they start writing their own scripts. And they start sharing their scripts or downloading scripts that other people have written and modifying them and stuff. And so it's interesting to me to see that even things that aren't full on I'm a developer, they are...like when I'm helping a designer debug his script, and he's like figuring things out, and like, "Oh, I got the variable wrong," and all the tweaking and stuff. I'm just like, oh my gosh, this is ubiquitous. This stuff is everywhere, and a lot of people are doing a bit of development as part of their jobs, even though they're not technically full-on developing.

AFTON: This kind of reminded me because I was thinking, I don't think I ever did anything like that. But then I remembered before I ever took my first coding class, I had a blog that I spent a lot of time on, and it was around having premature babies because two of my children were born prematurely. So I had started a blog that I spent a lot of time writing for, and I had some management UI that I could tweak things, and schedule, and make changes, and change colors or fonts. There was a little bit of customization I could do.

But my husband at the time was a web developer, and he would be like, "Oh, look, you can go to this place, and you can see the code that's producing [laughs] your page. And you can actually mess with it." And so there were a few things I wanted to change that he got in and changed. And I remember being really excited that that capability was right there. But it was like a foreign world, and I didn't know how to interact with it. But now that you're mentioning it, that did spark this intriguing like, oh, that's cool. So there was a little bit of that for me.

EDDY: I have a generic question for everyone here. Knowing what you know now, what personality traits should a person have in order for you to recommend them to programming? Like, oh, yeah, you're this kind of person. I think you'd be a really good fit for programming.

RAMSES: Curious, probably.

MIKE: I was thinking the exact same way, curiosity, and tenacity.

RAMSES: Yeah, that's a good one.

AFTON: I was going to say they like paying attention to details or organizing. [laughs] Those are skills I find helpful. And also don't easily get frustrated; someone who's willing to push through, even when something is difficult, willing to keep digging and persisting on a problem until they find a way to make things work.

MIKE: Absolutely. That's what I was trying to aim for with tenacity.

AFTON: Okay. [laughs]

MIKE: Maybe it didn't land. [laughs] I couldn't agree with you more. I've said to people before that software development is mostly about frustration management. And I'm really not trying to be snarky. I mean that fully because you're solving problems. And frustration, by definition, is getting blocked when you're trying to solve a problem or you're trying to do something. If you're trying to work through and solve some things, of course, you're going to run into roadblocks. If there weren't any roadblocks, the problem would already be solved, and you wouldn't be solving it in the first place.

So being willing to keep digging, even when it's frustrating, you know, manage the frustration and say, "Yep. I'm frustrated, and I'm going to keep looking because I'm frustrated," rather than being dissuaded, and that also connects to the curiosity that Ramses was saying. If you feed that curiosity, that gives you the emotional strength to keep digging, even though you're frustrated. Is that consistent with the experience of you all?

TAD: Yeah, I'd maybe even add creativity, maybe orthogonal thinking, meaning you have to generate like a whole bunch of different possible ways that you solve a problem. And then you try one, and you're like, oh man, that's not going to work. Okay, I've got to back up and take a different approach at this. Oh, that solution doesn't work either. And being able to think of a few different ways that you could solve the problem, which is really hard to get, and they don't really teach in school very well, I think.

It's funny to me that when I talk to people, they'll make excuses like, oh, I wasn't really that great at math in high school, or something like that. And the general perception of what you need to have to be a developer is different than what I think you actually need. I've heard a lot of excuses. [laughs] Like, wait, no, if you want to run an atom collider, then you probably do need to be really good at math. You have to have a really deep physics background. But if you want to tweak your blog, do you really need that math? Probably not, right? [laughs]

EDDY: I feel like there's a stigma from everyone from outside the scope where they're like, "Oh, every programmer and computer scientist needs to have huge mathematical comprehension." And like, [laughs] it could just be that I've only picked up semi-easy tickets, but to this day, I have yet to really hit a block because I'm not able to understand a math formula, and that's something. It could be different for senior developers.

MIKE: Has anybody here read a "Mathematician's Lament," also sometimes called "Lockhart's Lament?" It's written by a professional mathematician, and his lament is that mathematics teaching drives mathematics out of everybody. [laughs] And I laugh a little bit, but it's a tragic take on how that curiosity and creativity that you're talking about, Tad, ends up getting lost from rote teaching and learning to memorize the ways of doing things.

But what professional mathematicians do is nothing like memorizing formulas; rather, it is exactly what you described of coming up with a bunch of different possible ideas and creatively trying to find other ways to approach a problem and then trying out and see if they work, which is play. And play has evolutionary purpose. It's what we do to learn about the world, but it's fun. The fact that it's useful doesn't change the fact that it is fun, [laughs] and it is rewarding, that it is a joyful thing to do.

This is about mathematics. But if we treat anything, be it music, or writing, you name it, any human endeavor, if we make it something that's about memorization and regurgitation, we take that joy away rather than letting it be play, and computer science or mathematics, in general, is no different. A lot of people who think that they are not a math person really don't like being bored and genuinely have the ability to find creativity and pleasure in building things and just haven't been given the opportunity. I'd like to throw that out there.

AFTON: Mike, you mentioned learning through playing, and that reminded me that Ramses had mentioned that he loves learning every day and continuing to learn. I was thinking of that as another big drive to go into this field was that it would require constant and continual learning forever, and the challenges would always be new. And there would be new tools you could learn about to implement. And so I imagine this would not be a job that I could get bored at but that it would be constantly challenging and rewarding and always push lifelong learning, which really, really, I loved that idea. That was something I wanted.

MIKE: Yeah, it's true, isn't it? Not only is it something that will happen, but it has to happen. You can't have a career [laughs] in this field without the daily learning.

TAD: And it's not learning, just development. I've worked in the oil and gas industry. I've written software for the veterinary industry. I've worked at a marketing agency. So I've also had to learn those domains. I know a lot about how veterinarians track their medications and treat their animals and things like that. And I know a lot about a bunch of regulations about the oil and gas industry now and how they figure out mapping stuff. And it's everything, like, software is everywhere. And so you're learning development, but you're learning a little bit of possibly anything else.

MIKE: Maybe to take that a little bit further, none of us started a career in software, but we ended up there. And there's, I'm sure, need in whatever industry you're in, if you're in retail, if you're in oil and gas [laughs] industry, if you're a barista. You shouldn't necessarily think that software is somewhere else. There's probably a surprising amount of need for software right where you're at. And you might be able to pivot more easily than you think if you're not a software developer yet. Take that as a challenge. We need more developers. You shouldn't feel daunted by the fact that you haven't gotten there yet.

EDDY: Mike, I just want to point out that when you and Afton mentioned managing anger or pushing past those blockers, you know, frustration, I've hit that point with RSpec. I just want to say that. [laughs] But I'm pushing still, but it's a beast in itself.

MIKE: Take some time to talk to me for a few minutes. I'll give you some ideas that I think will help. Probably a good thing for a future podcast. That's a tool worth talking about. This was great. I loved hearing everybody's stories. I hope that it's inspiring to our listeners. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.