November 8th & 9th, 2024
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"This is fine" (the meme)

SeaGL 2019

Over the last year and a half, I’ve been attempting to complete my career change from a park ranger to a developer. In that year and a half, I have learned Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Javascript, and React.js at a coding bootcamp, Swift and XCode an internship, and SQL, ASP.NET, and Typescript during another internship. I’ve also been introduced to C#, C++, Java, and Python. And even though each time I started a new language felt like my life was going up in flames, over time I started to see the similarities of the languages and found it easier to read programs written in different languages. However, I also started to notice how not having a “specialty” language made me feel like I would never get a job as a developer. It was really important to me during this time to realize that being a jack of all trades, but feeling like a master of none doesn’t make a person a failure. It makes that person a master of being flexible and getting up to speed quickly. Here are some tips on keeping your sanity if asked to forget everything you’ve learned about a language, framework, or tool, and start a new one, and keep moving forward.

What the audience will learn:

  • What I did to get up to speed on new languages, frameworks, and/or tools, including finding and using tutorials, joining communities, and asking colleagues questions.
  • How I used grounding, affirmations, and reaching out to friends and networks to get through tough times of change.

Presenters

Kate Pond

Kate Pond, Allen Institute for Immunology

Part developer, part interpretive park ranger, & 100% awesome! Coding all the things & loving it!

Resources