A story about a Brazilian journalist who became Web developer in the Netherlands.

Seven months ago, I was in a completely different place than I am right now, I was in a job that I did not fit in, without much hope to find something better. Then, I saw a post on Linkedin about scholarships for women who want to start their career in tech.

My first thought was: “This is not for me”. I was never comfortable with technologies. Since I graduated in communication and study humanities my whole life, I thought I was good with people, not with computers.

I am not afraid to take challenges, so I decide to apply for it, and for my surprise, I got the scholarship.

January 20, I was attending my first class.

Lost in the middle of algorithms

The first month was the most overwhelmed of my life. We had 8 hours of class every day, five days a week. In one day, we had to learn at least three different concepts.

I was utterly lost, mostly because the last time that I studied math was in 2010 and was not even good at it. Now, I was sitting in class trying to remember how we can discover the average of an array of number – yes, I did not know what ‘average’ was.

We must solve two algorithmic challenges per week, and I had to spend at least 10 minutes trying to understand the problem. I was uncomfortable with all those tons of information, and, because of that, many times, I wondered if this field was something for me or if I had made a colossal mistake.

The right amount of effort

After the terrible result of my first JavaScript test, I woke up. The test made me see that if I wanted to achieve something in web development, I had to stop using my background as an excuse and put some effort into it.

I spent the next three months studying and creating projects. All the information that I learned I applied right away, building websites, or creating new features. There was not one second of my time that I was not coding or thinking about it. I started to read about code, listen to podcasts about development, and even watched the series Silicon Valley.

I am not going to say that it was easy, but now I am extremely comfortable coding, and I am entirely passionate about it. New technologies finally do not make me scared, and my background in humanities is not hunting me anymore. Instead, I believe that being a communicator helps me to code and build applications that better respond to the user’s needs.

To sums up, if you are facing a career transition, remember that if you put in the right amount of effort and like what you are doing there is absolutely nothing that you can not achieve.

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