My name is Robert. It’s great to meet you.
Let me begin by telling you the story of how I went from a career in mental health to an aspiring developer.
It began in October 2018. I was managing a wonderful team of mental health clinicians, a team we built over the course of three years with me at the helm. I was on track to advance by become a licensed therapist and was all but enrolled in a master’s program in counseling. I knew what I was doing and it felt comfortable. Things were going as planned.
Given all this, I would be lying if I said I was completely convinced that becoming a therapist, or mental health in general, was the right fit for me. Then came November and, of course, the universe always has a funny way of nudging you in the necessary direction. I was laid off from the company I had worked at for 6+ years. It was a hell of a nudge.
What followed were a few months of stubbornly refusing to re-apply to a job in healthcare. There was a lot of time to think between the part-time seasonal retail shifts and Uber driving cycle I found myself in. The question I kept asking myself, “what do I REALLY want to be doing with my life?” My wife responded to that question with one of her own, “what’s a company or industry that you admire?”
This brought back memories of a trip I took to the Bay Area in 2015. My friend who works at Google took us on a tour of the Googleplex in Mountain View. There was a wall of post-it notes in one of their kitchens that caught my eye. Upon further inspection, the post-it notes were written by Googlers for Googlers with snippets of inspiration/motivation, both technical and not.
There was my answer to both questions, in scribbles on small, yellow squares. They were inspiring, creative, and smart. That’s the type of person I want to be and the type of people I want to be working alongside with.
The very next day, I started my work toward my newfound goal of becoming a software engineer. I began devouring any and all information I could on development and eventually decided to enroll in a coding boot camp.
This blog is to document my learning as I go outside my comfort zone and work toward this new aspiration of mine. This began in November, but I am convinced that this is what I want to be doing for a very long time.
As I’m working through a rigorous boot camp and my first job in tech as a product manager, I know there will need to be a steep learning curve with countless hours going into it. That is why, beyond education reasons, this blog is a dedication to my incredibly loving and supportive wife, my hard-working and caring family, and of course, my pup, Molly, because she always knows the right things to say.
Let’s do this.
Clinical to Code 