Tell Me About Yourself

Let's get this one out of the way first. Every time I start a new thing on the internet–be it a new social media account or a new blog–I never know what to put in my bio. I don't know what to put in the About page. What definitive thing can I say about myself in a few paragraphs? How can I summarize who I am in just a few hundred words?

It’s kind of like that pesky interview command: “Tell me about yourself.” It’s not even a real question; there isn’t a question mark at the end. It’s mandatory—you have to respond with something. So, you answer with something generic. You say you’re a hard worker, a fast learner, and a team player. You say your favorite hobby is watching movies and that your favorite food is pizza. You mainly do this because you want to seem normal. You want to stand out but not for the wrong reasons, so you decide to hide how weird you really are.

The problem is that we're not fixed entities. We're human, and we contain multitudes. We are always becoming, always evolving. We are not just niches and brands. That said, we do have particular experiences that are unique to us. I know I'm as unique as everyone else, but I also have a specific point of view that others may not share. I have something to offer–something to say–that someone out there might need or want to hear. I just haven't quite figured out what that is. At least, not to the point where I can succinctly put it on a profile bio or an About page.

This post is my attempt at dealing with that paradox. I'm probably just like you, but I'm probably also different and weird in my own way. Let’s try to take a snapshot of what I’ve been up to and how I’ve shaped my identity over the past decade.

For a lack of a better term, I've been a semi-professional Programmer for the past four to five years. It all started first with my interest in Design. In 2013, I went back to college to study Graphic Design specializing in Interactive Design. I’d already dabbled with making websites in the early 2000s and had a rudimentary understanding of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. However, college was where I was formally introduced to web development and programming.

After finishing the A.S. Degree in Graphic and Interactive Design in 2017, I tried (with no luck) to land a job as either a Web Designer or a Frontend Developer for a few months. During that process, I realized I enjoyed writing code more than I enjoyed finding the perfect Pantone color combination in Illustrator. This led me to enroll in a JavaScript-focused “Full-Stack” coding bootcamp from 2019 to 2020.

The program lasted six months, and I hoped to land a Software Engineer role soon after. Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones who got a job right away—or at least not a real one. It’s been a frustrating five years. I’ve done dozens of interviews and eventually landed a position at a startup, but I was let go after barely a month because I was “too junior.” I then worked for a year as a Technical Support Engineer at a well-known SaaS company but struggled with the customer service aspect. After that, I had a short contract job as a “Web Developer,” helping a company migrate content from WordPress to Strapi CMS.

The main reason I call myself a “semi-professional” programmer is that I’ve been working as a Teaching Assistant for the same bootcamp I attended. I’m still at that job, but the company will be dropping its coding bootcamp programs after March.

I'm giving you this resume history so you know where I'm coming from. I'm also big on self-education and online courses. At this point I've come close to gaining the same foundational knowledge that you could get from a Computer Science degree–give or take some lower-level programming and the math. In the past few months I've gone through the Coursera specializations on Machine Learning, Math for Machine Learning, and I'm currently in the Deep Learning specialization.

In sum, I think I know a lot about this Coding thing, and that will probably be one of my main topics here, plus or minus a few other interests. Overall it will definitely focus on Technology. After all, I'm calling it ThreadPool.

I'm still figuring things out, but that's the journey I plan to share here. If you're also trying to break into coding, or just curious about the ups and downs of this world, I hope you’ll find something helpful—or at least entertaining—in my posts. Feel free to comment or reach out with your own experiences; I’d love to hear about your path. After all, we’re all just works in progress, and I’m excited to see where this one leads.

Tell me about yourself.