“I’m Not Technical!” Overcoming the Fear of Tech and my New Love Affair with Coding

Booleans, arrays, hashes… While loops, accumulators, conditionals...

If you went back in time and told the Hannah of spring 2020 that in less than a year, I would spend all my time thinking about these strange-sounding things, I would have asked, “What are you on about?” Well, after, “Who are you and where can I get one of those glitzy-looking time machines from?”

Last week, I wrote a technical post where I walked through how I solved a problem on the Makers pre-course step by step. This week, I’m just giving a bit of background about how I waded into the world of tech, resulting in my studying here at Makers.

We’ll start with my childhood neuroses. No, not all that stuff. That’s for my therapist.

I mean the mild neuroses induced by secondary school maths and science. Namely, the belief that “I’m not technical!”

GCSE science lessons primarily consisted of:

• An enduring desire to play with the bunsen burners but mostly copying vast swathes of prose from Dr. Ellis’ handwritten OHP acetate sheets. (Writing that has just made me realise that I am genuinely middle-aged now. Could this venture be a mid-life crisis? Ho hum…)

• Comprehension questions on textbooks full of circuits (although on occasion, Mr. Dale prancing around in a box of sand in red high heels to demonstrate pressure).
• Mr Aung’s biology lessons aka projector slides of curious growths or x-rays of people with jam jars shoved up their arses.

A solid foundation in the sciences.

My GCSE maths teacher convinced me that I was a maths genius (I got a B) and somehow I ended up bulking up his numbers for the A-level maths class (flattery really does get you anywhere).

I rue the day I didn’t do French A-level. But that’s another one for my therapist.

I failed P1, that’s how not-a-maths-genius I was. Falling behind and feeling stupid was a really unpleasant feeling.

I’m 34 and I still have recurring nightmares about my maths A-level.

I was scarred (in a very first-world kind of way) to the point that if you so much as mentioned a quadratic equation in my earshot, I’d have a bit of a hystrionic faint.

A solid foundation in maths.

This solid foundation in maths and the sciences had me convinced that I could never do anything technical because I didn’t understand “stuff like that”.

Fast forward slightly on the life story…

Slightly…

I did a psychology degree and my most feared modules were in statistics. I scraped by in these modules, swearing that for the rest of my time on this mortal coil, I would steer well clear of anything so much as a standard deviation. Not. For. Me. Thanks.

I worked in mental health. And student welfare at a University. And English teaching. And writing. Arts, humanities and social sciences — my safe space.

I value everything I have done for work (perhaps even the soul-sucking year doing customer service at Fujitsu-Siemens? Maybe?). I value my career history for the things I’ve learned and the experiences I’ve had. But the jobs I’ve had have not quite been the right fit for me. Luckily, I am not someone who is averse to moving on when something isn’t right.

Are we getting to the bit about tech yet or is there more life story?

Fine. The tech bit.

I have flirted on the edge of tech a few times.

I spent a year teaching for a company called Lingo Live, who provide language and communication coaching to professionals in tech companies. The way my students talked about their work really intrigued me, and I loved the sound of the work culture. What a shame that “I am not technical!”, I thought.

Last year, I volunteered my copywriting services to help some local tech bods with a platform they were building. One of the team suggested that I edit the text directly within the code itself and I nearly ran a mile. “I’m not technical!” (Cue maths-related flashbacks, etc. etc.).

Also last year, I felt increasingly dissatisfied with what I was trying to do (run a freelance copywriting business). Running a business requires marketing yourself. My personality and marketing just do not go hand in hand.

I enjoy writing. But the pressure of having to sell myself was taking the pleasure out of it. Add this to losing clients/struggling to find well-paying clients because of Covid. Do I really want to struggle to do something I don’t care enough about and constantly worry about when I’m next going to get paid? Well, no. Obviously not.

So, while bearing in mind that “I am not technical”, I looked into all of my options. Copywriting for an agency? Too marketing-y! Social work? I’m not the right person to do that. Teaching? I enjoyed teaching kids in Korea. But I have friends who teach in the UK and every time I see them they look like they’ve just been dug up… So probably not. Psychology? Been there, done that, realised it wasn’t for me. I guess my social sciences safe space isn’t that safe.

I had looked at coding before and thought it just looked either boring (coding is so far from boring, that I find this hilarious now) or too complicated. Those old fears were telling me I could not do this. But after some encouragement from a developer friend who was an English teacher with me in Korea before getting into programming, I decided there was nothing to lose by having a little dabble.

Cue plenty of research into courses, a proper nosey into the Makers’ blog posts, and several weeks of getting to know Ruby on Codecademy and Codewars.

Well, guess what? “I’m not technical”. But I can code. And I love it! And so far, not a standard deviation in sight!

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