Before I Knew It Was Code, I Knew It Was Magic

My mother used to bring people over to watch me beat Mario.

I was three. I kid you not.

I could get through those Nintendo games in a matter of days, and my mother wanted people to see what her baby could do. She had her own name for the big turtle-looking character. I eventually learned that his name was Bowser, but by then, he and I had already done business.

Video games came easily to me. I liked figuring out what happened next, what happened if I tried something different, and what I had to do to get past whatever was standing in my way.

Eventually, beating the games wasn’t enough.

I wanted to know how to build them.

A computer was a possibility before it was a possession

We didn’t have a computer in our house for most of my childhood. That came much later, around my junior or senior year of high school.

But I already had an idea of what programming was.

Somebody typed words and symbols into a machine. Those words meant something to the machine. And then the machine made something happen.

That was about the extent of my understanding.

It was also enough to fascinate me.

Imagine knowing that somewhere there was a language you could learn that would let you make the things you loved. You didn’t know the language yet. You didn’t necessarily have the tools. But you knew it existed.

That was how programming lived in my mind: a possibility waiting on access.

Meanwhile, the arts were right there, and I was in all of them. Marching band, dance, theater, musicals, chorus. I was flag captain. I loved to sing.

In college, I considered music education before realizing that what I really wanted was to perform classical music. Opera had my attention.

At the time, I thought I was choosing between different futures.

Looking back, I can see the same desire running through all of them.

I wanted to make something.

The spreadsheet was a side door

I was a first-generation college student, and paying for my education was my responsibility. So was figuring out how to support myself while getting it.

I didn’t have the luxury of treating every career decision as a question of pure passion. Sometimes the question was simply: What can I do that will let me keep going?

One of my early corporate jobs, while I was still in college, involved financial reporting at an auto-loan business. I became good at Excel.

Then I became bothered by Excel.

Not the application itself. The way we were using it.

We had these powerful computers, and here we were, doing the same things over and over by hand. There had to be a better way. There had to be something this machine could take off our plates.

That question led me to SQL, Visual Basic, and macros. I started learning how to automate the reporting.

And there it was again.

The feeling I had as a child.

Something that had been slow and repetitive became something I could describe, instruct, and run.

I had found a little piece of the magic.

I didn’t leave the artist behind

For a while, music and technology kept meeting me in different places.

During a period of teaching music, I found myself especially interested in music technology. I wanted to explore it with my students. The technical possibilities kept pulling at my attention.

Eventually, I had to tell myself the truth: I still loved music, but I didn’t want to keep engaging with it professionally in that particular way.

Loving something didn’t mean I owed it the rest of my working life.

So I followed the curiosity.

I took courses and earned certificates. I tutored and mentored through a coding boot camp. I freelanced. I built projects, studied, got stuck, and studied some more.

When I call myself self-taught, I don’t mean nobody helped me.

I mean I had to assemble the education and keep myself moving through it. There wasn’t one institution handing me a map from where I stood to where I wanted to be.

Preparation, persistence, and a few unpaid projects

Freelancing taught me things I wanted to learn and a few things I would have happily skipped.

During the pandemic, some clients could no longer pay. Other projects turned out to have more hope behind them than an actual business.

You’re building somebody a website to sell T-shirts, and there ain’t no T-shirt.

You understand what I’m saying?

Eventually, I needed steadier income. I decided to pursue a corporate software engineering role.

The search took about eight months.

I studied algorithms. Took the courses. Watched the videos. Built the portfolio. Practiced on LeetCode. Pushed to GitHub. Prepared for interviews, then prepared some more.

I am a preparer. Give me something unfamiliar, and my first instinct is to gather enough information that it stops feeling like a stranger.

But some of the places I went looking for information offered something else.

I found comments suggesting that people of color in technical roles were there for reasons other than their ability. I was already nervous about interviews. Now I was reading strangers explain why somebody who looked like me probably didn’t belong.

That hurt more than I wanted it to.

It also wasn’t the end of the story.

I kept going. I completed multiple interviews and performed well on the technical assessments for the role I eventually accepted.

I became a software engineer.

Later, I became a senior software engineer.

The girl who wanted to know how the game worked had learned how to build things of her own.

Another instrument

I don’t think of my arts background as a detour anymore.

When I make music, I work with structure, expression, and interpretation. When I write software, I find myself reaching for those same instincts in another form.

There are rules to learn. There are choices to make inside them. There is something I can imagine but cannot yet hear—or see—until I do the work of bringing it into the world.

That is the part I love.

Not simply getting the right answer. Creating something that wasn’t there before.

I didn’t stop being an artist when I became an engineer.

I found another instrument.

And I still like to make it do a little magic.