Although a seemingly fair and straightforward question, this blog post had me stumped for quite some time. The truth is, my motivation has changed frequently and continues to fluctuate the further I advance in Flatiron’s Web Development program. But for the sake of brevity, we will go with the “origin” story highlighting the academic roots of my passion for computer programming and the practicality this path offers for my career development.
It all started way back when … a few months ago in November of 2017.
The passion:
Many people overlook the benefits of studying history, but historians are the scrappy MacGyvers academia! We are trained to research primary sources of the past, analyze broad amounts of information, and piece them together into functional explanations for complex topics. I could have furthered my graduate studies in the liberal arts, but that path seemed too Sherlock Holmes-like. So instead, I chose Flatiron because I felt that the next step towards becoming the MacGyver of libraries was learning how to harness the massive amount of data being produced through computer programming.
For example, take down the unfathomable statistic that every two days, we humans create roughly five exabytes of information! Contextualizing this figure in their book The New Digital Age, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen equate five exabytes to all the information created from the dawn of civilization to about 2003! With data at that scale, programming skills are essential to discern clues for making working models to better navigate the modern world.
Furthermore, it is just an all around exciting time to be in the tech world. In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil asserts how technical change has been so rapid and profound, that it constitutes a rupture in the fabric of human history. For an avid fan of intellectual and economic historiography (not to mention childhood fan of wide-spanning histories like the BBC documentary series The Ascent of Man and more recently Yuval Harari’s Sapiens) I was just fascinated with this argument. It was like putting Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts that structure scientific revolutions on an exponential growth scale for technological revolutions.
I felt restless reading about all these changes and wanted to take an active part in them. While studying economics in graduate school, I would spend hours tangentially reading how open-source approaches were reframing “the tragedy of the commons” problem into a “collaborative commons” solution. Hypotheses such as the possibility for a near zero marginal cost society made pouring over pages of traditional theory less relevant for my graduate studies. Where would the many theories grounded in nationally based actors stand in a future shaped by transnational forces that supersede terrestrial boundaries? With all these ideas buzzing in my head, I couldn’t think of any better subject to study than the internet–an ever growing, amorphous creation of our own making, and demonstration of pure anarchy.
The practicality:
Before applying to Flatiron, I was a Senior Team Lead at Capgemini with 5 years of prior experience in project management, business analytics, and consulting. The ubiquity of computer code in the workplace and in my personal life were daily reminders of how much value was in learning to program. I would wake up, read the news about some massive IPO for a new tech company, work a job that completely revolved around technology and data, and use the majority of my free time listening to music on my phone or surfing the web with my laptop. I realized how most of my actions revolved around technology, but again, the relationship was one-sided: I was sidelined as a consumer not a producer.
Therefore, learning to code addressed both of my personal and professional ambitions. Flatiron’s affordable and robust learning platform made it a clear choice to help me towards my goal, and so far, is proving itself to be the panacea for my career problems. Creating an open and welcoming community with so many forms of support helped me see that I didn’t need to be some genius to learn how to code and lowered the entry barrier for me to enhance my skills and enter a new industry.