hello(“World”) // a greeting
Years ago, I fell in love with a career. Every day I went to work excited to learn more about the Hospitality Industry. With so many different sources of information and a wide variety of styles to dive into, it was a learner’s paradise. I’d leave work and spend my nights at home experimenting with a small idea until the late hours of the night. Then I found out what it was that was exciting about this industry. I thrived on solving problems and experimentation. I loved finding new ways to accomplish anything in the Restaurant Industry, but it turned out I loved solving problems anywhere!
I started a job at a worker-owned collective and enjoyed collaborating with others to solve the problems of a growing company. The day came when I found a problem I thought could be solved with programming: produce orders. I assumed it would be simple to write a script to estimate how much pizza we’d sell on a given day. We had years of sales reports that I could use as data points. Although my math skills now would still (probably) get me out of high school, statistics was a class I breezed through in summer school while in college. I decided to start learning Python because it has a lot of statistics libraries as options.
While growing up in the Bay Area, I grew up fascinated by tech. My first personal tech purchases were a Casio digital planner and Palm Pilot. I was fascinated by a personal computer that fits in your pocket. I never actually tried programming though. Naive as I was, I thought, “how hard can it be to learn to program?” It’s pretty hard if you don’t have a good support system and a meaningful intent. I’d played with apps aimed at teaching children to code in Swift, and it was fine… fun even! Yet, I didn’t really understand what was happening.
At 5 o’clock every morning I would get up to make a pot of coffee and watch my Udemy course at the kitchen table. One morning I realized that I’m doing exactly what I used to do with cooking: learning to problem solve and give instructions. Here was the difference: I didn’t have to eat mistakes. There was added clarity in being able to look back and see if I can understand what I had just written, let alone if it would make sense. Admittedly, this was how I used to write my papers in college: thought vomit into the keyboard and then move things around and rework it. But this wasn’t a supported argument, this was a recipe for my computer to execute. And I knew how to describe recipes and solutions to people in stressful situations. We do that all the time in restaurant kitchens.
while(globalPandemic){justKeepSwimming()}
I was accepted for a coding boot camp at Rithm School in San Francisco. We had an interview process and projects to complete before starting the program, so we handled some of the rigors of preparation and learning on our own before we started. Luckily the program began in March of 2020! What could possibly go wrong? A fresh start, springtime vibes, global pandemic on the rise… COVID-19 turned our live classroom to an online format as Shelter-in-Place orders started. My class had prepared for a change in our lives just to get to coding boot camp. Now all of us were shifting again! My family plans pivoted as preschools had to close, and outsourced childcare was no longer a safe option.
It was hard to learn in those ever-changing conditions but worth it. So why did I continue to code? It is fun and challenging to look at the nuance in life and try to describe it in language to solve a problem. I look to technologies that have changed the landscape for more than just the affluent.
Square, for instance, allowed small businesses to get started because they could now accept card payments. Some cooks I knew were able to start pop-up restaurants thanks to Square and the other payment alternatives that followed. It used to be that Aloha was the “only” option for restaurants that needed a point of sale (POS) system. After Square and tablets were introduced, POS systems were reduced in size, appearance, and cost.
I code to create solutions. I code because it helps me see problems from a bigger picture. I enjoy breaking problems down into manageable chunks. I want to work in tech to create solutions. I want to work for a company that level’s the playing field. That can be access to services for an underserved population, increases access to education, or allows small businesses to be able to start and operate with greater ease.
