How did you break in into the tech industry?

Graduated with a degree in economics and because I liked the subject but didn’t want to go into more school for a PhD or teach and I didn’t attend an elite school (even if I did it wouldn’t have mattered) I didn’t get into the high flying world of high finance.

So returning home after graduation someone told me about a role with the state as a SQL an analyst. I studied SQL for a few days and didn’t get the job but when I reached out to a recruiter who was looking to fill a junior DBA position and asked if I knew SQL I said I did. (Hubris, complete hubris). I barely got the job — my SQL was super weak.

And from there I learned like a sponge and had various jobs from DBA to data warehouse dev to Python developer to SRE and now as a data engineer.

So hubris plus a recruiter plus a junior role with low expectations was my foot in the door.

(Edit: prior to this at 12 j took apart my father’s 486 and put it back together before he got home from work for the day. It was our only computer. And when it worked I fell in love with hardware and computing.)

I started making my own websites when we moved to the US and got our first computer. I ended up doing some free web design and development as a teenager for local bands and record companies, in exchange for merch. After high school in Australia, I applied for a Junior Programmer role at a games company that just opened up in my city. I was very enthusiastic, but entirely unqualified to be a games programmer. I was called in to interview for a QA role instead, and was hired for that. After that company went down I freelanced doing web dev for small local businesses and government agencies.

There was not much of a stable games industry in my country at the time, so I got my Australian citizenship in order to apply for a Working Holiday Visa to Sweden. I spent a year learning how to make JavaScript games with an engine called ImpactJS to build a portfolio and learn to make games rather than just websites. After moving to Sweden in 2012, I started applying for jobs through local game company sites. I applied for a Build Engineer role at a large game company, as judging by the role description it seemed to be a good middle ground between my previous games QA work and more technical scripting and coding work. From there I picked up as many programming (in addition to build script and machine management) tasks as I could to keep focusing in that direction.

After shipping the first project in build I moved to tools dev, then engine dev, backend dev, now frontend dev (back to web stuff, we've come full circle!) It's been a lot of fun.

My father bought me a Timex Sinclair 1000 with the 15K expansion that kept breaking. So then he bought me a Commodore 64 and I learned BASIC and 6502 assembly. I was 13 then. High School taught me UCSD Pascal on Apple //e units and Turbo Pascal 3.0 on IBM PC/XT units. I started out self taught and then took classes in programming.