Why Did I Decide To Learn Software Development

I’m a financial engineer, speak two languages, live far away from where I grew up in, and worked the majority of my productive life in the restaurant industry in New York City, so I’m used to change, not afraid of challenges and able to adapt to any circumstances, but one, boredom.

After 6 years of working as a manager for an upper east side cafe, I realized as much as I loved the people I worked for, worked with and especially my customers, I was feeling empty like I wasn’t doing enough with my life.

I enrolled myself into a Financial Analysis Certificate program at NYU, it took me a year to finish it, had the opportunity to work as a financial analyst for an investment firm last summer, and I became fully aware that finance wasn’t my passion either.

I always liked Excel, yes, Microsoft Excel, I’m pretty good at it, and loved building “Models” to make manual tasks easier, for some reason I used to “write” my functions in line, instead of adding them by clicking buttons, which is like baby steps to writing code. I also like taking computers apart (I learned on my own), upgrade them, fix them, etc.

Actually my first computer in NYC was built after a trip around my block on a winter Friday night (garbage day), just when I arrived to New York, I didn’t have enough money to buy one, so I picked up some broken ones from the street and put one together,… what can I say, I can’t live without a computer.

Last fall I got a flipboard email suggesting a free Harvard Course; Introduction to Computer Science CS50, it looked very interesting, and I always wanted to know how computers work, so I figured, why not?, I had the time and the will to learn… yeah I know… I am very curious.. and also a firm believer that anyone can learn anything, so I started it, and I loved it.

I learned how to build little programs, how to tell the computer to do things for me, and that was just the beginning, after that, I became more and more curious about it, about different programming languages, all the things you can build, I was hooked.

The more I researched about it the more I fell in love with it, the kind of people you can work with, the absolute real need for more web developers, the kind of cool things you can create… have you heard about Twitter or Facebook?… yeah… stuff like that, and the best part of it? You don’t have to be a genius, nor you need a computer science degree, just passion, imagination, willing to learn and a cool coffee mug.