In many ways, my decision to learn to code would be no surprise at all l to those who knew a younger version of me. I was fascinated by computers from quite a young age, and wanted to be a programmer when I grew up. I would read the manuals for my parents’ 1980s PC clone and check out books from the public library on BASIC and input programs into our computer. We got Internet access early on (1996) and I spent hours surfing the Web. But later on, my interests turned to the humanities, subjects like anthropology, history, and eventually religious studies. Religion was the focus of my undergraduate and graduate studies and I completed a PhD in Buddhist Studies.
Midway through my PhD program it became clear that the academic job market was very tight and I needed to consider alternatives to an academic career. Software engineering appealed to me as something I would be good at, and that spoke to my continuing interests in mathematics and technology. I firmly believe that technology is something that can benefit the world by allowing knowledge and talents to be widely shared. In my academic career, I have benefited from a wide variety of online databases and Web apps, including the Tibetan and Himalayan Library with their Tibetan Translation (thlib.org) and the Buddhist Digital Resource Center. Within academia, digital humanities is a rapidly growing field. So I began to explore resources to learn coding, such as Shay Howe’s web design tutorials (https://learn.shayhowe.com/) and Learn Python the Hard Way (https://learncodethehardway.org/python/). Looking for a more formal curriculum, I took courses from Codecademy and Rice University’s Coursera program Fundamentals of Computing. One program I signed up for was Flatiron School’s Bootcamp Prep, to try out a coding bootcamp platform. I found the platform easy to use and highly educational. When my career search took a turn where software engineering became the best option, I naturally turned to Flatiron School.