My Journey In Tech — Believing in Myself

My blogs chronicle my experience as a technologist making my way into Silicon Valley. I am a queer person of color, gender non-conforming, immigrant, and ex-foster youth. I come from a non-traditional computer science background. I studied a few CS courses in college and ended up majoring in the humanities before becoming a teacher. Teaching web development to under served teens turned me on to coding. After getting a scholarship to a prominent coding school, I began working at start ups in San Francisco. Half of my blogs are about technical subjects and the other half about equality and tech access (my journey).

In 2015, I was teaching middle school ESL (English As A Second Language) in Oakland, California. I was following in my mom’s footsteps. She taught at an urban public school system in Camden, NJ, for 25 years. I had been teaching for five. Camden is a lot like Oakland in its racial demographic as well as crime and poverty rates. In 2016, the census states that 38% of Camden’s population live in poverty while 20% of Oakland experience the same. The other thing BOTH places have in common, which I got to experience attending public school for 1 year in Camden and teaching in Oakland for 5, was that its people are strong and the youth have SO MUCH heart.

Teaching in an urban public education system is by no means easy. I got to see the oppressive systems of capitalism first hand, from having to ration paper because there were no school supplies, to spending $2,000 of my hard earned $32,000/year salary on curriculum materials, to having no heat in the classroom, and to over testing immigrant and US students who had repeatedly failed standardized exams. It was easy to blame myself and the students. But by year 2, I began to realize that method did not positively develop people.

No matter these obstacles, by expanding our minds, gaining new knowledge, and analyzing systemic oppression — WE (the students and I) were able to instill in each other the ability to dream — to achieve more than what society had taught us we could.

In the spring of 2015, I was asked to teach an after school class on web development. The program also drew research upon gender dynamics and success in the classroom. All of this interested me. I taught a class of all girls, all boys, and coed. Teaching during the day and teaching AFTER SCHOOL is extremely different. The curriculum I was given was not based on tests rather learning by doing. The focus was on learning how to code and building final projects — websites or games.

I remember seeing the happiness and confidence in my students’ voices when they were able to successfully debug code and get it to a working state. I was being affected by it too. I felt good helping them learn something new that allowed them to see their success manifest immediately. Some students took to code like a fish to water. I felt similar.

When I first started telling people, I was leaving teaching to pursue a career in computer programming, I remember the first thing a fellow teacher said to me, “Are you good at that?” not “that’s awesome” or “let me know how I can support” or “tell me more” but basically feeding my sense of self-doubt. When you have a dream, you have to protect it, even from those who should be instilling confidence instead of doubt in others.

I remember my ex-partner telling me, when I was going to coding school from 830am — 6pm and taking on odd jobs like driving for LYFT, delivering Postmates, basically anything that would bring in income, to quit coding school and go back to teaching (she was a teacher too). I had to protect my dream from even those closest to me because, as Will Smith says in his film Pursuit of Happyness, “People can’t do something themselves, they wanna tell you, ‘you can’t do it.’ Thankfully, I did not listen. I relied instead on my own guide — myself, as Will Smith’s real life character Chris Gardner says, “If you want something. Go get it. Period”

I have been on the path to believing in myself since then. Honing my instincts, trusting myself and finding others who believe / have faith in me — family, friends, co-workers, strangers. Letting go of people, situations, and environments that does not feed the fire of belief in myself. I surround myself with people who unequivocally believe in me, to the point of seeing what I cannot even see — my potential.

The amazing thing is that there are many more people who do believe in me and water the seeds of self-confidence that has proven to be an antidote. I feel it in my bones everyday at work — people who have my back and are cheering for me to succeed — including and most importantly — MYSELF. With my self-confidence building come the fruits of my labor, I was recently asked to participate in a panel at Transform Tech. I’m excited to share my journey with my trans and gender non-conforming community.