How coding knowledge has altered Nora’s career trajectory
🙍♀️ Before SheCodes
Nora is a very adventurous, intelligent, and worldly SheCodes graduate. She was born in Germany but has been a sort of nomad for the past few years and considers Lisbon to be her home base. She received a Master’s degree in Comparative Cultural Studies on culture, literature, and art from the University of Lisbon. She’s fluent in Dutch, English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish (and now a couple of coding languages, too 😅).
She’s always been interested in technology and coding, and her interest has only grown stronger over time; however, she had this idea in her mind that coding was too difficult for her since she’s not the best at math.
“Tech has always been interesting to me. When I was 15, I played around with HTML in MySpace and tried to build a website with HTML. I've also been making websites with Wordpress for a long time but I always figured that programming and computer science was not for me because I thought it was too "mathy". I never knew where or how I could dive deeper. However, I always liked making things and I remember that in my high school year book, other students wrote that they thought that I was going to be an inventor.”
She saw coding as an opportunity to allow her to invent things from scratch and express her creativity. So she decided to get a bit out of her comfort zone and dive deep into coding.
“I studied Social Sciences and Humanities, I worked for a few years as a language teacher, from there moved into Education Management and Learning Experience Design: In 2019 however, I felt that I had taken that route as far as I could and I felt that it was time for a change. SheCodes was the first step into a new direction for me and an important stepping stone in my journey.”
👩💻 Her SheCodes Experience
As aforementioned, Nora was very motivated to gain some coding knowledge due to her growing interest in technology and development, along with her desire to open the door to new opportunities. SheCodes seemed like the perfect fit to her.
“I finally wanted to get a better grasp of what coding entailed and whether tech could actually be an area for me. As someone who studied Sociology, I’ve always been aware of the gender gap in the technological field. However, I’ve actually been interested in Computer Science ever since I was a child. I decided to make the most of the career transition that I was in and consider a career in the tech industry. SheCodes was the opportunity I had been waiting for to learn more about the different aspects of a product development process and to figure out where my place could be in tech.”
After taking the beginner workshop, she finally had a good coding basis and was hooked. She decided that she wanted to deepen her coding knowledge to possibly change career trajectories and increase her freedom to work on personal projects.
“It wasn’t until the SheCodes workshop that I started to understand the mechanisms of coding. I loved the classes, the environment, the teacher. There was an openness and a generally positive, encouraging atmosphere where everybody got to bring their own skills and ideas to the table. It was all very much not intimidating and inclusive.”
“SheCodes sparked a curiosity and gave me a newfound sense of direction of where my career could be heading and most importantly, how my knowledge of coding could open new doors for me and give me more independence when developing my own projects and ideas. The SheCodes workshop and SheCodes Plus React were super helpful for me and they pushed me in the right direction!”
Check out Nora’s unique singing weather app that was built in Vanilla JavaScript: https://suspicious-bell-e71e40.netlify.app/ 🎶🌤
🙋 How SheCodes has Helped to Change Her Life
For the past year, Nora has been working as a freelance UX Designer and Researcher. She's been working as a freelance UX Designer and Researcher for various young to more evolved startups. She reached the decision to get into the field of UX Design by combining her new coding knowledge with her pre-existing skill set.
“I needed to find something where I would be able to use my coding skills, knowledge, and professional background all together. For someone like me with various skills, interests and an elevated need for stimulation, UX Design was the obvious way forward as my wide-ranging experience and knowledge is considered to be a strength in this field. It brings together humanities, social sciences, design, research, and coding too. I feel like SheCodes Plus provided me with a solid base that I'll be able to fall back on for many years to come.”
Her daily tasks span a wide spectrum and depend on the project on which she’s working. Some of her daily tasks include conducting quantitative and qualitative user research, audits, competitive analysis, and usability testing to learn more about the users, along with identifying the biggest usability issues to increase user engagement and retention. She’s also putting her coding knowledge to good use, too. 😏The knowledge she gained in SheCodes has helped her better communicate with developer colleagues and understand the tools she uses. At the moment, she is using a tool called Webflow - a responsive web design tool, CMS, and hosting platform. She's using it to build responsive websites from scratch.
“My coding knowledge helps me to communicate designs to developers, helps me to design better, and it also helps me to understand tools like Webflow, a tool that allows me to design and develop websites for clients completely from scratch.”
Not only is her coding knowledge helpful to her work, it’s also super enjoyable for her. She has plans to create some coding projects on the side in the near future.
“What I like about coding, and about everything that I'm doing professionally these days, is that you can see a direct result and that gives me great satisfaction. I love tweaking, adjusting and playing around with codes, settings, etc. and it provides me with a sense of control and understanding of where I can and want to take a project to."
👩💼 Advice to Future SheCodes Student
When asked what advice she would give to future SheCodes students, Nora said…
“Just go for it, what do you have to lose? ;)”
Check out Nora’s testimonials from the SheCodes Workshop and SheCodes Plus React 👇
Workshop testimonial:
“SheCodes is a fantastic workshop that I would highly recommend to anyone who's interested in a career in tech - and also just anyone who wants to understand a little bit more about the world we live in. Matt is a truly gifted teacher and knows how to make coding accessible to a wider audience. A big thank you to the whole team!”
Plus React testimonial:
“SheCodes is a great hands-on course that taught me how to think like a developer and build an app from scratch in ES6 and React. Great experience!”
