If you met me you wouldn't imagine that I have social anxiety, or that I was not popular in school. I seem like an average, talkative and overall positive person.

But the truth is, I have always been an outcast. And it took me 30 years to be fully okay with that.

I got married back in 2015 after being a student at a local bible college in Louisville Ky. I had just gone through the motions of school and didn't know what I was going to do for a career. I dropped out of high school when I was 17, got my GED and worked a full-time job for most of the latter half of my teenage years. I tried my hand at a lot of different industries not finding something that fits. I had always been creative with words from an early age, my mom still has many poems that erupted from my 9-year-old self. I wanted so badly to find a creative outlet that could be a "job", but my skill set didn't fit. Although I liked writing, It wasn't interesting enough for me to be an author, and honestly, my poems were the only decent thing.

I say all of this to give you a firm grasp of the panic that set in while working at a call center for nearly 3 years. Panic. Pure, adrenaline-pumping panic. The kind where you have so many questions, you can't grab a hold of one to even consider an answer. Being recently married, and then finding out we were expected our first child had put my panic in turbo!

But alas, a silver lining appeared in the dark cloudy sky. I had a good friend of mine feeling the same dread of having to come into work. The mundane aspect of answering 160+ phone calls a day saying the same ole things. My lifeline out of here lied in our common "AH-HA!" moment. We had both asked for more work, to pull us into some sort of challenge and what we were given changed our lives forever.

We were told to assist in coding. Now, I won't size this up to make it seem like we were given something rad, but for us, it was an escape and an introduction to our new career of choice. We used HTML/CSS to write documentation. I am talking using tables to add "format" to the documents because anything else would break the pages completely. But this was enough to give us a taste, and from there we started finding out more projects we could get our hands-on.

Fast forward a year and a half and I completed an online Software Bootcamp and had convinced my work to allow me to create a full-stack .NET/C# web app.

Now I have worked professionally in software development for almost 3 years. The dev community has opened up its arms to me and my weirdness and I am so thankful for that! The amount of teamwork and collaboration our industry has is astounding!

You made it through my rant!

• What is your story?

• What got you into Programming?