Broker to Coder? - the beginning

After a bunch of sales roles in tech and consulting over the last 5 years, I've had a lot of exposure to Fintech, SaaS and all the wonderful technology buzzwords. Then something happened, which is best described as a convergence and the two things that came to a head were:

One - I wanted more from my role, despite having a lot of the required skills for sales and being relatively successful, I just didn’t feel fulfilled (snowflake alert! Impostor syndrome?! I hear you murmuring). Well who knows. I do know that this is not the first time I have felt this about my role. Prior to sales I did a 10-year stint on a cut-throat broking floor, trading fixed income derivatives, again pretty successful, but still not content.

Two - technology! It’s everywhere and I don’t really understand it, especially this software stuff built in the 'cloud'. Often my SaaS sales conversations with prospects would take me well out of my depth of knowledge, I would then be relying on my EQ and innate comfort with the unknown, to muddle through. So what you ask?! Well, I realised that there were three drivers:

1. Intellectual curiosity
2. A craving for a creative outlet
3. Enjoyment in solving problems

In a partly subconscious attempt to fulfil these drivers, I did an MBA and learnt a couple of languages to a practically useful standard. This all scratched the “itch’ so to speak, but it was never enough and I needed more! After some thorough research, conversations with friends and my professional network (and without labouring the point) I landed on something that will allow me to combine my existing strengths with my drivers. Enter stage door right, me using lockdown time to embark on a 3-month full-time web development programme.

I am now 2 weeks into this intensive course and we have covered a staggering amount of content, I can now use bash, Github, write semantic HTML5, CSS and SCSS. We have also covered concepts including; responsive design, links/images, box-model, flex, grid, webforms. I have also built an MVP (minimum viable product) version of my portfolio website to in theory showcase my new skills, the next few weeks we will be jumping into JavaScript 'where it will get a lot more technical'. Wish me luck, I will be back with an update, probably titled ‘week 6 - what the hell was I thinking?!