Tiffany White

Brett: [00:00:00 ] [00:00:00 ]My guest this week is Tiffany White, an independent software developer. Thanks for being here, Tiffany.

[00:00:11 ]Tiffany: [00:00:11 ] Thank you for having me, Brett.

[00:00:13 ]Brett: [00:00:13 ] So when did you first start to code?

[00:00:17 ]Tiffany: [00:00:17 ] early 2015. I just was. Thinking that I needed a career change. And someone mentioned the Brico camp to me and I started learning right there.

[00:00:31 ] Brett: [00:00:31 ] What were you doing before that?

[00:00:33 ]Tiffany: [00:00:33 ] I was doing absolutely nothing before that. I was going to school For a long time, just basically a professional student who was trying to get a degree in English and perhaps, get an MFA in writing. But as someone who didn’t have any money, I felt like that wasn’t an appropriate career choice at the time.

[00:00:57 ]Brett: [00:00:57 ] Need them, you need to have money to be here. And [00:01:00 ] MFA and lit.

[00:01:01 ] Tiffany: [00:01:01 ] Oh, yes. Oh yes. So I I lived in Pittsburgh at the time and there were a whole bunch of techniques out there and I went to one coding supply is one of the biggest ones out there learned a little Ruby and decided that’s what I wanted to do.

[00:01:15 ]Brett: [00:01:15 ] And you went to school for a little while

[00:01:19 ]Tiffany: [00:01:19 ] Yeah. I went to the

[00:01:20 ]Brett: [00:01:20 ] For a code.

[00:01:21 ] Tiffany: [00:01:21 ] Yeah. Yeah. I went to Pitt on their university of Pittsburgh for computer science for two years. It was interesting to see how different that environment was compared to me learning on my own. There was just, I don’t want to say. That it was a bad experience.

[00:01:43 ] It was a different experience because you’re learning more theory and more algorithms and data structures and things like that. That things that you aren’t really going to use on the job? At least when I was working as my previous job, I didn’t use [00:02:00 ] any of that stuff. It did teach you how to think how to learn, how to think about abstractions.

[00:02:07 ]But I just, I found that the courses that I need to take along with the computer science courses that I was taking just did not, I just didn’t want to, so to take those, I was getting older and I just, I didn’t want to continue to go through that route. So I decided I was just going to do it on my own plus Pitt is expensive.

[00:02:28 ] So there was that.

[00:02:30 ]Brett: [00:02:30 ] So do you feel like going through things like free code camp that you got perhaps a more useful education that way?

[00:02:37 ]Tiffany: [00:02:37 ] Yes, I think so. They do have their, algorithm and data structures. Part of the pre co camp that’s really invaluable. So when I started free code camp, it was right at the beginning of Ricoh camps existence. So they were basically, aggregating different. Different sources for you to learn.

[00:02:57 ]Then they made their own curriculum [00:03:00 ] and then have improved upon it for the past six years. And it’s just, it’s an amazing resource and it’s free, and I learned a good bit there and I would recommend it to anyone starting out, like wanting to learn how to code it’s. It’s great. And it’s not just web development.

[00:03:16 ] It’s not just JavaScript. They have Python now and machine learning. So check it out.

[00:03:22 ] Brett: [00:03:22 ] So you were able to parlay that then into an actual industry job. You went from. A an English major to working in tech. W did you, was there an uphill battle to try to get that first job without a college degree?

[00:03:38 ]Tiffany: [00:03:38 ] There was and it wasn’t so much that. The lack of a degree for me, I got, there were people who reached out to me from like Google and Twitter and things like that. I think what it was for me was my lack of building anything useful. When you [00:04:00 ] go to free coop free code camp, and you work on the curriculum, there are projects that you need to do, are things you need to do projects to actually want to the next section to get a certificate or whatever.

[00:04:12 ]And I wasn’t doing that. I was going to different tutorial sites and, Feeling like I was doing things by doing code alongs and things like that. And that, that hindered me more than not having a computer science degree.

[00:04:30 ]Brett: [00:04:30 ] What would the recommendation there be if someone were following in your path, what would you say to do differently?

[00:04:36 ]Tiffany: [00:04:36 ] I would tell them to. Build things learned a little bit from safe Rico camper. You Demi course learn whatever you can. From there, you don’t need to finish those things. Learn the basics and start building a project and continue to dip in and out of. Tutorials, but don’t just spend time spinning your wheels, doing [00:05:00 ] these things because you’re not actually learning anything.

[00:05:02 ] You’re not synthesizing the things that you’re learning and applying them to something real, a real world project. And not just a project that you get from like a Demi course. But a project that you’ve thought of. On your own, like even take a, an idea from a repo that I found on GitHub called app ideas, you can take an idea from there and then start building it with the stuff that you’ve learned from whatever tutorial you have been doing.

[00:05:32 ] So I think that building a project and several projects is going to help you in the long run, learn how. Programming works and learn how to be a developer and landing your first software job.

[00:05:51 ] Brett: [00:05:51 ] It’s interesting that you say that I, because that’s the only way that I. Can learn. I don’t think I’ve ever finished an [00:06:00 ] online course of any kind. I dropped out of a computer science degree after a year. Like I only learned by creating my own projects and like my GitHub has a hundred, some repositories.

[00:06:13 ] And if any employer has ever wanted to know what do I know? It’s literally all there get hub repositories. And that has served me pretty well.

[00:06:23 ]Tiffany: [00:06:23 ] Yeah. I, yeah, I wasted so much time. And I’ve never finished an online course and part of, I think I finished one and it was the course that I learned the most in. But I think a lot of it for me was fear. It was fear of the blank text editor. And not knowing where to begin when I was thrown into the fire.

[00:06:47 ]And it’s, it was scary to me. And I did not like when I was growing up I, there were, I w I was in quote unquote gifted [00:07:00 ] classes and honors classes and things like that. Things came easily to me. When I was growing up in, in school, I never skipped any grades because my mom wouldn’t allow it, but. When I start