I have been interested in coding for ~8 years but never considered a career building digital products until recently. In fact, the first code I ever wrote was as a Peace Corps Volunteer in 2012.
A micro-finance organization (MFI) in a small Cameroonian village needed a simple way to record transactions and automate basic financial processes. For years, they tracked the MFI’s finances almost entirely by hand, a laborious process that could easily result in miscalculations. I started building the MFI an Excel tool but quickly ran into Excel’s limitations when it came to printing out a balance sheet across 60+ accounts. After spending hours on Google, I discovered that to build the dynamic tool that the MFI needed, I needed to learn VBA, a programming language for Excel, so that I could write Excel-based programs, or “macros”. Thanks to the programming community’s openness (and Stack Overflow), I built the MFI an Excel macro that saves them A LOT of time. Generating financial reports used to take the MFI days, but now can be performed with the click of a button.
Since the Peace Corps, between each career transition in my life, I’ve found myself taking free online coding courses, just for fun. Finally, this year, I decided to commit to a profession that would allow me to build amazing digital products. I’m excited to begin my journey with the Flatiron School, but even more, I can’t wait to develop technologies that help people around the world.