In this special guest blog post, Web Development Bootcamp student Dana Teagle (they/she) reflects on the paths that led them to launching a coding career at Juno College.
I could type before I could write, and although that may be a common experience for kids growing up these days, it wasn’t as common in 1998 when I was four years old.
A few years later, my grandfather began teaching me programming languages on my Windows computer. He taught me how to use BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and MS-DOS — tools he had used for his job and had come to love playing with as a hobby; this inspired me to read about other languages focused more on design, and to teach myself the fundamentals of HTML and CSS.
I started putting pages together not long after, and a couple of years later, I built my first live website, which linked to flash games and various other sites and was hosted using a small bit of storage that came included on my parents’ internet plan. These experiences in my childhood were the beginning of my coding journey, though I didn’t yet realize it.
These experiences in my childhood were the beginning of my coding journey, though I didn’t yet realize it.
I moved away from working with programming languages and toward navigating GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) for quite a while as I developed my passion for video editing with Final Cut Pro and After Effects as a teenager. I began shooting short movies on my new DSLR and editing them for school projects or small film festivals. My high school offered a Specialist High Skills Major in media and I put all my focus into cultivating these skills.
I ultimately applied to university for Film Production, but was not accepted. Although disappointed at the time, this proved to be a pivotal moment in my professional trajectory: I moved to Toronto from my hometown in Niagara and began a career working in professional kitchens, and worked my way up from junior dishwasher to kitchen manager in a matter of years. However, I hit the ceiling of what I wanted to achieve quite quickly; I had developed interpersonal teamwork skills, management skills, and a craft, but ultimately I couldn’t see a future for myself.
Trying to find a new path once again, I applied for a Landscape Technician program at college and completed one semester before realising that this wasn’t my direction either. In that program, I had far more fun designing landscaping projects on the computer than I did doing any of the manual labour or Latin memorization. I also hit a breaking point with some of the work I had done on understanding my identity and gender, and it was at that time that I dropped out of college and began my medical gender transition.
After a couple years back in the restaurant industry and developing my understanding of myself again, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. A few friends and acquaintances began asking me whether I could help them build a website for their businesses. I began Dana Teagle, Virtual Assistance — a small operation where I aided businesses with graphic design, social media, and web design. I began building sites using Squarespace and Wordpress, but as I desired to do more complex layouts, I found myself skimming documents of HTML and CSS, and rediscovered my passion.
I had found a career path where I could use my teamwork skills, my management skills, my eye for layout, and my love of design...
Having known a couple of friends who left restaurant work for the Juno College Web Development Bootcamp, I started taking courses at the school, and immediately became hooked. I had found a career path where I could use my teamwork skills, my management skills, my eye for layout, and my love of design — all bolstered by my natural understanding of programming languages, which I developed as a child. It was actually not too long ago, the week of my Juno Bootcamp interview, that I found a floppy disk full of old website files from those early days.
When I consider my path with a wide lens, it makes perfect sense. None of these experiences was a waste — it was the journey that brought me to my career.
This article was originally posted on Dana's Medium. You can also check out Dana's portfolio!
Change careers with Juno College's Coding Bootcamp
Get the specialized skills and support you need to launch a rewarding new career in web development. Available in full-time and part-time formats, Live Online or In-Person in Toronto — absolute beginners welcome!