Why I Became a Developer (And Why I'm Still Here 17 Years Later)
Source: Dev.to
Early Beginnings
I was a MySpace kid 😬, talking gifs, background images, and an autoplay song that was basically my whole personality in three minutes or less. Updated weekly, of course. Blasting the second somebody landed on my page—no warning, no apologies.
If you were one of those people who actually dug into the code to make your profile look way different from everybody else…same. We could’ve been good friends. That whole era was my first real taste of building something on a screen that other people could actually experience. I didn’t have a name for what that feeling was; I just knew I loved it.
High School Competition
In high school I joined FBLA (Future Business Leaders of America), competed in a website‑design competition, and placed second. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t first; what mattered was seeing what I built sitting there, being looked at, judged on its own. I made that from scratch. It existed because I made it exist. Something about that got into my system and honestly never left.
Career Journey
The path from “the girl who placed 2nd in a high‑school web competition” to Senior Software Engineer is not a highlight reel. There was a lot of imposter syndrome, codebases I opened and immediately wanted to close, things I Googled that I probably should have already known, and deployments failing because of the dumbest mistakes.
There were moments I genuinely wondered if I actually belonged in this field. I’m still learning, still figuring things out. Anybody who tells you that part stops at some point is either lying or not pushing themselves hard enough. Stumbling doesn’t mean you’re in the wrong place—it just means you’re actually doing the work.
I spent 16 of those years at The Weather Company building products that tens of millions of people used every single day. That changes how you think about what you’re doing. You stop treating code like a checklist and start treating it like something that actually matters—because it does. When that many people depend on what you build to work, performance is not optional, accessibility is not a bonus feature, and you’re writing code for real people with real devices and real lives.
The tech never stops moving. I’ve gone from HTML tables to Flexbox to Grid, from vanilla JS to jQuery to Angular to React, from spaghetti code and “just get it working” to TypeScript, component libraries, and design systems that have to hold up at scale. I’ve had to learn, relearn, and sometimes straight‑up unlearn things more times than I can count.
Lessons Learned
- Love for the work: I genuinely love this job most days, even on the days I absolutely don’t (if that makes sense).
- Logic + creativity: I get to be logical and creative at the same time, writing clean, structured code that also looks good and feels good to use, and sometimes even designing things too.
- Accessibility matters: “Looks good and feels good to use” has to include everyone. Something isn’t really done if only some people can use it.
- Continuous learning: Every project still teaches me something—different problems, different challenges, something new to figure out.
That girl who spent way too long perfecting her MySpace layout before she even knew what CSS was still shows up every time a component renders exactly like the mockup, every time the console comes back clean, every time something she built just works, and every time she gets an “LGTM” on a PR.
Closing Thought
Getting second place at a high‑school competition started all of this. I’ll take it.