When All Else Fails

When all else fails, and sometimes it does, I think about Alan Turing. I see him smiling at me. I see him being proud of me. It’s not easy becoming a software engineer, you know. I have a sociology degree (and two environmental masters degrees). What am I doing here. My a levels were in art and English and French and sociology. What am I doing here. How did I get here. How did I end up here. All of my friends at uni were computer scientists. I was always the artsy one. I only ever dated mathematicians or computer scientists. I saw my first AI movies because my maths PhD boyfriend back in 2014 thought that they were cool. I never dreamed that I would be a programmer. I wanted to be an actor or a writer or a singer or a teacher. Not once ever did I see my future with computers. Then 2022 happened and it came along and I fell in love with coding. Never once as I dreamed and dreamed of this job did I imagine the pain and the frustration it would bring me. They say that 50% of women 

Quit tech by the time they’re 35. I always promised it wouldn’t be me. How could I ditch years and years of learning. So when I get sad

When I cry over my career

When I can’t take it anymore

Alan Turing comes to visit me

And he is always welcome here

Thank you 

I don’t know what more there is to say here. The inevitable highs and lows come and go. I have had so many extra barriers to face. Switching from Frontend to backend than Frontend again. 

The results are long term.

For example I can use the terminal and handle rebases better than a lot of Frontend engineers I know. The backend and my backend manager really drilled it into me. I do nearly all my git stuff in the terminal and I prefer it there. I know really amazing git commands that even really senior engineers don’t know and they help me to manage my work in a really cool way. I have only just started making diagrams and these are showing that everything is a pattern.

I had to deal with accessibility issues and biases and difficult environments and environments that hated me and told me there was something wrong with me

I had to deal with being laid off suddenly. It has been a short but stormy software career so far. But tonight it’s just too much. 

And when it’s too much Alan Turing comes to visit. When it’s too much, Alan Turing comes to call. He is proud of me. He is proud of all young people in software. He is proud of all of us for pushing the limits and of juniors for learning and trying and becoming. He is proud of me for ditching everything to do a career I only had a whim I could do. He is proud of how hard I worked even just to get to this point. He knows that the results are coming. They have been coming for a long time. They are still coming. Look down on me and you may be looking down on the wrong person 

Anyway thanks 

The point is 

When all else fails

I am visited by the greatest computer science genius of all time

I’m not really complaining and he knows that I can do it and I know that we can do it together 

Thank you