Ch-ch-ch-changes
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love to Code
A newsletter about building inspiring products.
Since you last heard from me, I’ve been learning to code.
You might be wondering what would posses a creative director (and new mom) to learn to code.
As long as I can remember I have been interested in art *and* science — In high school, When I wasn’t in the Biology lab, I was in the darkroom. I have degrees in both Biology and design. I have spent most of my career trying to figure out how to do both.
Entrepreneurship checked both those boxes for me. Then, once I stepped away I didn’t know what to do.
So I did what I often do when I’m stuck — I asked for advice.
Here’s what everyone told me: Figure out what transferable skills you have and what job they fit into.
After more conversations and many lists, I landed on branding & strategy for DTC startups. I found some clients, and worked on some interesting projects, but it was a challenge for me to land the types of projects I wanted to work on, or charge the fees I felt I deserved as someone who had built multiple brands from nothing.
Even so, from my potential clients’ perspective, I wasn’t competitive.
This is hard to admit.
My ego (and the part of my brain that is susceptible to social media conditioning) is screaming at me as I write this to put a positive spin on it. But instead, I am going to be honest – there was no way getting around not being able to offer a Red Antler-type pedigree.
There were ways I could have become competitive — starting in a more junior role at an agency to work my way back up, but my heart wasn’t in it.
I wasn’t truly excited about what I was doing.
Turns out, the advice everyone gave me…well, it was wrong.
Wrong for me, at least.
I didn’t need to figure out what I had done that could be useful to people — I needed to figure out what I loved doing that could be useful to people.
The answer to that is:
Making things.
I LOVE making things.
That was my #1 criteria for the next phase of my career.
And I decided on 3 additional priorities:
Doing something that is needed (and valued).
I didn’t want to send any more proposals and hear “we’ve decided to push this out for 6 months” or “what can we do with half the budget”?
Not a nice to have, but a must have.
Learning new things.
I had been doing the same things for quite some time and while it’s nice becoming an expert, I really missed challenging my brain in new ways.
Opportunity and flexibility.
I realize that there have been (and continue to be) layoffs in tech and there aren’t as many developer jobs out there as there may have been 6 months ago, but as someone who was looking for work as a fashion designer post economic crash, the job prospects are still more favorable. (For reference, LinkedIn shows around 3,500 front end developer job results in NY compared to clothing design’s…under 50.)
One last important factor was getting comfortable with starting from square one in my career.
And that got me to coding.
The storyteller in me would really like to wrap this up with an exciting job announcement (Subject Line: From Fashion to FAANG in 9 months), but I am not at the end of this story yet.
I’m not even the middle. You know, the part in the movie where everything seems like it’s going to fall part. Based on the 696 page book I just bought for interview prep, I am going to guess that high-stress story arc will be around the time of my technical interviews.
But it does feel like I am on the right track. I am a big believer in paying attention to the feedback I’m getting. I am still learning and I already have freelance projects. That’s a clear sign to me that this is working.
In a podcast I listened to the other day, James Clear said: “I try to let the world tell me no before I tell myself no.”
So far, the world has not said no.
In the next issue, we’ll be discussing: How to Start Something New.
And if you’d like to dive into the nitty gritty of my learning process, and breakdowns of JavaScript and React concepts, you can follow along on LinkedIn.
Onwards and upwards!
on a similar journey. you got this!!