Breaking into Tech from a non-technical background 💪

Hello amazing community folks!!! I'm so glad I'm finally deciding on writing blog posts and my first one had to be about my journey in tech field.

The first time I felt I should go in Tech :

If you ask me when did I get interested or felt like getting involved in tech, I wouldn't have a precise answer to that.
Tech and development came to me very naturally, more of like hobby.

I remember the days from teenage hood, when computer science was part of school syllabus, I enjoyed helping my mates when we would build simple websites on HTML.(I know that HTML is not a programming language, pls don't start a comment thread over that haha). All I wanted to do was explore.

The bottom line of stepping in Tech :

I have always said that the most important part of being in Tech is that you constantly explore, learn, apply and again learn. This is a never ending cycle.
The more you know, the less it is - technology will change, always and faster than you think.

The first time I wrote "hello world" :

I began six years ago, the resources were limited, it took time to figure out a lot of things if you are self taught. I grew up between smartphones being just launched and facebook was still a thing.

`My first "hello world" was in Python.`

YES, thats my first programming language and I believe I am not the only one who did this. I used to borrow books from library on Python and learn things. It was a tedious process and no doubt it paid off. Overtime, I learnt Java, MySQL and database handling with python.

Coding was not a necessity but a choice :

Since I began to learn things, one thing I understood about myself was - I cannot repeat the same set of tasks everyday. This meant, that even though I loved coding, I would still hop off to graphic designing and poetry (hidden talent you may call) to get some mind off from coding.
I loved communicating with people and being very honest - loved extra co-curriculars.

Talking about my education, in my intermediate I chose the stream which people were quite disappointed about.

Any guesses ?

I took Commerce. I felt I had strong desires to learn how business and management works but my love for IT didn't end with this choice. Engineering was something that would have never worked out for me. I knew that, the quench of this expanding horizons in tech wouldn't come by my degree and therefore it's not necessary to go with a conventional choice of subject.

The best or strongest combination I built over years was mix of management and tech. People went from doing engineering and then taking MBA. This thing taught me a lot.

Skills + Knowledge > Degree

Some educational history :

I completed my 12th in 2020, yup the first set of batch who passed during covid and couldn't appear for two of my board exams. Out of which, one was Information Practices subject.
In both my board exams- I have always been below 90%, my college is second tier, and I am doing course in business management field.

Open Source changed my life :

I can't express the importance of Time when covid struck. A lot of people lost opportunities - and I took that period as an opportunity. I jumped in Open Source. I started learning and building in Public. I overcame the fear of speaking in public when there is no script and have to mention Twitter. This twitter community has given me so much.

Open Source is one thing where your background will not matter as long as you know how to use Version Control and have control over one or more than one language.

EVERY SINGLE CONTRIBUTION COUNTS.

My first stepping stone towards an internship :

I started off with making non-code contributions from last year. Parallelly, I explored DevOps and learnt things around Kubernetes and Microservices. My first contribution happened to be in Data on Kubernetes Community. This community is led Bart Farrell. I wrote a blog post based on one of the video and submitted it for review and good response. This boosted my confidence. With continuous contributions within community, the next amazing thing that happened was - I ended up being one of the four foundation interns at DoK Community. Kunal Kushwaha was the program head for that cohort. We learnt alot from collaborations, events and ofcourse about K8s.

I am keeping the rest of the experiences for next time but
one thing I do want to mention out is :

There is no roadmap for breaking in tech.
You can't follow someone's exact path but
what you can do is always reach out to community
and collect as much knowledge as you can.

The objective of doing something related to tech should be more on the side of learning and giving something valuable to people

In the end, I have just gratitude for the amazing community that has supported and motivated me to do better things - consistently .

Do let me know in comments if this blog helped you to get a clarity of thoughts or anything else that you would like to share :)

Until next time😃