The Tale of How the Girl in IT Gathered

“You're a girl, what programming do you want?” - it was this phrase that became my farewell to the world of information technology. The phrase of a native person in response to a careless manifestation of feelings that are bursting with me. But if I had to listen to him, there would be neither a tale, nor this progress.

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My story: the meaninglessness of old knowledge and the desire for a better life

Hi, my name is Vika, and I have been considered a humanist all my life.

Information technology for me has always been something magically unattainable for several reasons.

It so happened that I spent a conscious youth on bashorg. For me, the humor in the style “how to patch KDE2 under FreeBSD” was incomprehensible, but I felt a certain pride in the fact that I knew about it, even if I knew the letters at the level.

During my studies, I had only one mini-course on HTML - but this did not stop him from surfacing as an image of a beautiful page with hyperlinks in my head after seven years.

But fundamental was the opinion of the environment. I was considered, if not stupid, then completely deprived of the ability to mathematics. As a teenager, I accepted this opinion without even thinking.

In twenty-four years, she acquired a high school diploma and two diplomas of secondary vocational education. The last was pharmaceutical. My love of pharmacology began with the realization of some power over the human body and the presentation of drugs as a powerful weapon in the hands of a competent specialist who can help or hurt. Years passed, knowledge grew: pharmaceutical conferences, the legal side of pharmacy, work with objections and so on.

A little five-year upgrade:

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Along with knowledge, an understanding of their meaninglessness grew - laws that are not respected and do not want to be followed in pursuit of revenue, and the environment that breaks your lovingly built house of cards in a favorable environment with a sense of self-importance. I did not burn out, but I wished for myself a better life. After all, we are what surrounds us, right?

How I studied and study: minus the face-broken keyboard, plus a cool project in the portfolio

The first experience in teaching programming ended after a month of beating with the face on the keyboard - it was difficult to realize anything in a randomly found book on the Internet and an open notebook. The ardor diminished, the desire quenched. For a year. After which I decided that I need to start with the development of resources.

Articles, websites, familiar programmers, a bunch of educational projects that promise to make you an ideal developer in three months, or even earlier, channels on the notorious video hosting, giving the sea the necessary and not very information. I had enough desires and opportunities, the problem was the lack of systematization of my knowledge. And determination. I was not ready to spend the whole salary for a pig in a poke, or to cover my ears, which poured from all sides: “You don’t have a technical education, it’s too late for you to study, you have to think about your family, you should, should, should .. . "

And then I found out about the Hexlet. Quite by chance, he was mentioned in passing in one of the conversations about the difficulty of self-study. Not as a one-time course, but as a complete school. And I was hooked.

The turning point occurred recently - after the end of my first project. This is his favorite piece:

A console game that I made myself

Working in your own account on GitHub under the guidance of an experienced mentor is completely different. And such actions as initializing the repository and setting up the working environment using the package manager described in the "tasks" are painted in an exciting feeling of responsibility for what you do.

Out of habit, the “tasok” set is a stupor, but you begin to understand why juniors are asked for projects in the resume, at least non-profit. This is a completely different level of perception. This is the moment when you have already become familiar with the concept of variables, learned to write functions, including anonymous ones, learned about linear-iterative and linear-recursive processes, and exactly at the moment when the euphoria overwhelms you, and the feeling that you you can change the world, except in a dream, they say to you: “Create a file and write”, “Select the general logic and put it into a separate function”, “Do not forget about the proper naming and design principles”, “Do not complicate!”. It’s like a cold shower on the head, which does not cancel its boil. I am extremely glad that I managed to catch this feeling before starting the work “in the fields”.

Only in readme it was possible to show your personality:

In readme you can give free rein to creativity

Learning has always been difficult. OOP at one time seemed to me an impossible obstacle. Attempts to understand at least the basics were countless - I lost ten days on this, having received about the same number of condescending messages in the style of: "You just do not give up." But at some point, the determination of the desire to close everything and hide in a corner with the body's defensive reaction to attempts to absorb an abundance of new information helped.

It has become easier. In any case, this was the case with learning SQL. Perhaps because of his declarativeness, of course, but that is not accurate.

There is a project, a resume is ready. Ahead of the interview

At some point, I realized that if pharmacology is “power” over the human body, then programming is “power” over almost the whole world. The programming language, in turn, is a weapon with which you can either raise a company to a new level or destroy it by accidental negligence. I called myself a latent dictator and plunged into the abyss of information technology with my head.

Six months ago, I was proud that I set up a working environment on Windows, put together a whole list of books and thought about the fact that I want to connect my life with programming. Now the subject of my pride is the very full-fledged project, the list of books already read from the collected, but most importantly, an understanding of the importance of basic knowledge and the foundations of the programming language that I have chosen. And awareness of the responsibility that falls on the shoulders of everyone who connects himself with development.

Of course, this is still a very small track record, I have a lot of work ahead, but I wanted to give a little inspiration to those readers of this tale who once came across the arrogant “maybe it’s worth finding something simpler”, to give those reading this article with skepticism a little confidence that there are people who approach the study of a programming language with all responsibility, and give yourself a little courage.

Because the resume is ready, the most important knowledge is obtained, only a little decisiveness is lacking. But now the cat in the bag is me. She didn’t begin to close her ears, by the way, she learned to abstract from other people's opinions. I had three courses in abstraction.