The short version? COVID-19
I’m sure I can’t be the first or last person to start a tech career in the midst of quarantine. I had some interest in web development before, but so many hours at home with no work definitely gave me the final push.
The long version…
Most of my life, I haven’t considered myself a heavily tech-oriented person. My work and interests were largely focused on performing arts, managing events, and various types of teaching (I am still a yoga instructor). Gaining tech skills was occasionally suggested to me as a safety net for all my various gig-economy jobs, but I never thought of it as something I’d even be able to do, let alone enjoy.
However, in January of 2016, going through a gig-dry-spell and on a New-Year’s-fueled self-improvement kick, some well-placed marketing I can’t now remember led me to try some courses in front-end development with Skillcrush. A few hours each day, I practiced HTML & CSS in small, bite-sized lessons, and found to my surprise that not only could I follow along pretty well, but that working in code scratched a similar itch to another hobby I’d been sure I couldn’t do but now loved– crochet.
Crochet is learned by repeating the basic stitches over and over again, usually from very pre-determined patterns others have written down. It starts out frustrating but eventually becomes soothing. And with time, it becomes exciting as you notice all the different combinations you can make with the building blocks of your stitches and get brave enough to start deviating from the patterns and inventing to suit your own tastes.
In short, I realized what everyone else here has– working with code is actually fun. Even for my very lifelong arts-and-humanities Theater/Film/Philosophy major self.
I didn’t immediately go full steam into learning more– the gigs came back, and rent bills demanded that I take the jobs I already had the experience and connections to get, as quickly as they could come. I didn’t have enough free time to justify the cost of the Skillcrush classes, and I found a lot of the free resources difficult to navigate without a lot of prior knowledge. Learning more about development started to fade into the background as a daydream, a back-burner project…
…which brings us back to this year. Almost overnight, every source of income I had– at the moment, mostly organizing film festivals, teaching yoga, and modelling for art class– disappeared, and with no clear return date in sight. It hit me pretty hard. I take a lot of pride in my work and my independence, and now here I was newly-30 and taking checks from my parents (until I finally caved and applied for unemployment).
It was as good a time as any to get back to the keyboard. A… (ahem) …parental scholarship (Thanks, Mom!) allowed me to race through most of Skillcrush curriculum. The project kept me sane. I practiced building websites almost compulsively, some with no intent to ever publish to the web. My fiancee got very little quality time with me but never complained, happy to finally see me doing something other than cry and sleep for the first time in weeks. I began to see a potential career future emerge, one that was quarantine-proof and that I actually loved.
All that was left was to figure out what to do next.
A phone conversation with a more experienced website developer inspired my biggest web project so far, Paperless Playhouse. The idea was to take advantage of people’s newfound desire to touch as little as possible and get people to try out smartphone-based playbills for performance events as things started opening back up. I’d seen theaters attempt digital programs before as both a green initiative and cost saving measure, but had never quite liked the implementation– usually involving passing out slips of paper with instructions to every audience member (defeating the purpose) that would then bring them to a PDF of what the printed program would have been. It was difficult to navigate and often didn’t look very good on a cell phone screen.
Right now, www.paperlessplayhouse.com operates very simply – folks shoot me an email with their project info, I code up a unique page for them on the website with a playbill tailored for viewing on a small screen. They get an easy to remember URL plus a QR code that can be displayed for their audiences, reducing printing to one or two signs. At the moment, it’s all free in exchange for whatever experience and feedback they can provide me.
It’s a small project, but it’s help me identify where I need to keep growing. Through the software engineering program at Flatiron, I plan to learn the skills I need to automate a builder where customers can make and preview their program, and pay a small fee to have it published. Through the UX Design Institue, where I am also studying remotely in the next six months, I plan to ensure that the design and functionality are accessible to both theater owners and audiences to give it its greatest chance of success. And through both of these experiences, I hope to understand where I should go next. :-)