Who Am I?
I have written a couple of blogs, without an intro myself blog. Suppose, it is never too late, as I always say!
Hi, I am Victoria. I am also a person of disability, to be specific, I am profound deaf. As you may wonder, what does "profound deaf" mean? It means that I lost 100% of my hearing in both ears. I cannot hear anything beside the airplane engine. I have hearing aids that help me to hear most sounds around me. Can I lip-read? Yes, I can! However, it depends on whom I talk to. If the person is someone that I often talk daily, I have no problem to read their lips for conversation. Now, it is even more difficult to communicate with people who wear a mask during a pandemic. 😔
University
Let's fast-forward here a bit. I went from "not sure what to do" to "I decided to get a degree in Packaging Science". I had an interested in web development during my last 2 years of the university and even took web development as minor. At the time, one of the web development classes were conflicted with my major classes. After thought about my choices for a while, I decided to drop the minor instead since the class won't be offered until a year after, and it would delay my graduation. The web development words got buried deep in the back of my mind that I completely forgot about it. This is also where my life took a detour, I decided to pursue my Master's in Packaging Science.
You are probably wondering what is Packaging Science? It is a broad topic, but in short, the main goal is to design a package that will protect your products at the minimum cost from damaging during transportations. Imagine this, when you buy something from online or stores, you would want to receive undamaged products when you open the box.
Work Life to want to get in the tech
The Beginning
After finished university and back to home in Canada, I had a hard time to find a job. At first, I got a part-time job as an administrative assistant for a short time. Finally, in June 2017, I landed a full time job and worked at a cosmetics company. As the time went on, I slowly realized that I am not exactly happy with my job and I was not really getting a resources or support for career growth.
Around 3 years after I worked full-time
From this point, I went on a search spree to find relative and more information what programming languages to learn and what path to take on Google. At first, I decided to try Python based on the recommendation. I was reading Python tutorial and did exercises as the tutorial shows. Beside Python, I looked into cybersecurity, and bought a couple of e-books to read. At the time, I was directionless and alone. I had no idea what to do and where to start. Until I remembered, I took web development as my minor when I was in university, then I decided to go the web development direction.
This gif described my feeling at the time very well.
And now I look back, I realized why I didn't learn Python well because I was only reading them without building any projects.
Self-learning web development part-time for a year
I found w3school. I started learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from there. It somewhat helped me and I also repeated the same mistake I did with Python. This had to change. So, I went on a search spree again, but with YouTube this time, I found a couple of YouTubers who teach web development related. I decided to following them along and built a couple website. From there, I found Frontend Mentor, Zero to Mastery, and communities. With these resources I have, I kept practising my frontend skills through Frontend Mentor.
You can find past challenges I did with Frontend Mentor here.
100Devs
I came cross Leon's software engineer bootcamp from Zero to Mastery's discord. I checked the link out, and found out it is a free of charge. At first, I thought, "really, free bootcamp?". I figured out I could attend a few classes and see from there. After a few classes, I went from Let's see what happen after a few classes to WOW, this person is a legend. Everything he said is so motivational!. I learned quite a few new things like learning how to learn, anki flashcard app, how to network, coffee chat etc. Also, the reason, I decided to join 100Devs was because I felt like I needed a guide through the journey with a structured program and to meet others who are in similar shoes as me.
I personally didn't want to get on social media, but with a little push from 100Devs, I decided...just do it, and I am glad that I got on Twitter, because I found more people who changed their careers to software engineer/developer in their 30's or later. It is pretty awesome and inspirational! I also use Twitter to hold myself accountable with 100 Days of Code. I made a post of what results I have with 100 Days of code on LinkedIn: learned how to manage time better, see huge improvement in productivity and so on. Overall, joining Twitter brings great impact on me. Lastly, there are tons of awesome people to follow and it brings in more positives to you!
The 50th days of the 100 Days of Code post on Linkedin.
Thank you!
If you are reading this, I want to say thank you for taking your time and read the whole blog about me and my journey to the tech industry. 😍
If you are interested to get to know more about me or just want to talk about something else, feel free to connect me on LinkedIn or following me on Twitter!