How I got here
Why I was there at all
At 19, I found out I was going to be a dad. There was an option where I stayed in school and leaned on family to make it work. I chose to find a job and earn my own money instead.
I stayed five and a half years. Whole eggs went in and came out as powder, yolk, and white for other factories. The job was a solution to solve the problem of being dependent on everybody for when our kid would be born.
Taught by strangers
No course, no cohort, nobody sitting beside me. I learned from whatever I could find, tried things, broke things, and kept going without knowing whether any of it had a future. A Slack community and a handful of people on Twitter were the closest thing I had to teachers. Nobody knew they were acting as an example for me and my future career.
After 3+ years, I talked to my fiancé about taking a leap and hopefully switching up my career into something that would give myself and my family better opportunities. I've contacted a recruiter and had the craziest amount of luck and got my first job as an in-house developer.
Someone from the Laravel community helped me get my second job in tech. Laravel 4.2 landed in 2014, and it has been the pillar my whole career has leaned on.
In the door, still an outsider
While I got those jobs, I've always felt like I was an outsider who didn't belong in tech. That is the crazy thing about impostor syndrome! I have been through interviews, got hired, got the jobs, and got feedback that people are happy.
Yet I always felt as if I was out of reach, feeling like I didn't belong in the room.
Where it became real
Back-end work with real clients and real deadlines. Test suites, error monitoring, the habit of shipping things that don't fall over. Somewhere in those eighteen months the fraud feeling quietly stopped.
The two lines meet here, six years after the second one started.
When people started asking me
Healthcare and non-profit projects, a DTAP pipeline built from scratch, Scrum rolled out across an org. Then a legacy API rewritten from the ground up, past 90% test coverage. Somewhere in there the questions started coming to me, from interns and from colleagues.
That turned out to be the part I love most.
From building it to deciding it
An RFM system that segments customers and feeds our CDP, plus a real-time hub that brings our support channels together. Then a step sideways into product ownership, interim, PSPO I in hand. I don't write the production code at work anymore. I decide what's worth building.
I've done it long enough to like it, not long enough to claim it.