From Nursing to Software Engineering
Let me take you back to the year 2014 ⏳. There was no international pandemic, but an economic crisis 💸 hit my home country, Spain, quite hard. I had just finished my Nursing Degree 💊 and, looking for a job, I decided to move to the UK, which was a quite common move for Spanish nurses back then.
Being able to be independent, improving my English, meeting new people... it was good and all but I wanted something else. I didn't want to keep growing old being a nurse, doing the same tasks every day 😑.
What is coding about?
I had always seen programming as a mysterious ability that only very clever people with a good grasp of mathematics and electronics could really comprehend 😎. I didn't see myself, who had "specialized" in the biology/chemistry side of science, as a potential developer 😢.
But I wanted to try it out, at least to confirm that it wasn't for me. So I managed to find a free and online book 📖 (at least at the time!):
"Learn Python 2 The Hard Way"
I loved it 💘. Its author, Zed A. Shaw, explained how developers are usually considered (even by themselves!) as demigods with mysterious powers 🦸♀️, but actually, they are just very lazy people. People who automate boring tasks so a machine can do them for them 👩💻.
Another learning that I still remember from Zed (aside from the useful coding exercises and explanations) is that coding is a skill like any other. It doesn't have true meaning by itself but only combined with other skills or knowledge. Even for a nurse 💉 like me, who knows, maybe someday I would find out how to combine my two specializations 🔗!
My way into code
But the truth is that what caught me, in the end, was the book promise of doing a small videogame 🎮 as the last exercise. After all, my old love for computers and my newfound love for coding came from my biggest passion: videogames!
To be honest with you, I didn't finish that game... well, I haven't really "finished" any of my games ever yet 😅. And I'm not going to make up an excuse for that, not really 😉.
Anyway, after I finished the book, I went back to Spain and enrolled in a 2-year course to get a Technical Degree in "Backend" Software Development 📜.
I never got back to nursing, although you don't really ever quit being your family's nurse... the same thing that happens when you learn to code and suddenly everybody wants you to fix their printers 😅!