Margarida

I have a master degree in Chemical Engineering and spent three years as a Researcher in that field. However, I was needing a change and as my research project ended, I became interested in learning new skills and coding seemed like something interesting that could lead me to new opportunities, since there are so many job offers in this field. I quickly became more interested in the web development area so I enrolled in some online courses such as Codecademy and freeCodeCamp. I got to practice HTML and CSS and a little Javascript until an opportunity appeared to enroll in a Technology Internship which at the time seemed like a good opportunity to introduce me to this new career path and improve my skills since it would be a ‘learn on the job’ methodology, meaning a faster learning process. 

After the internship ended, I still wanted to improve my front end development skills. I was searching for courses on web development or front-end development around Lisbon that I could do and attend in person. At the time, I already had some experience in coding because of my current job but not in the web development area, which I had really enjoyed learning previously. I decided I wanted to start implementing web development more, even in my free time.

That’s when I found SheCodes and it appeared to be a good option for me - it was on a weekend, was not expensive and seemed to be an intensive kind of course; it seemed the perfect opportunity to reintroduce me to the coding basics of web development that I hadn’t implemented for a while now. And it was!

After taking SheCodes, the interest bug in coding stayed and I kept looking for Web Development courses that I could do in person to keep learning. I first heard about SheCodes Plus during the SheCodes workshop and decided to apply as soon as applications opened. 

In SheCodes Plus, mainly we got to learn and implement more HTML, CSS and JavaScript and learn about the framework React, which for me was a totally new world, and I was motivated to try to implement it all in my final project! The classes were demanding but engaging, and we got tasks every week which were very helpful to keep track of what we were learning. We had half of the classes online that were more technical/theoretical and half practical classes where we got to implement what we learned on the online class and ask for help. For me, this was a good process because during the online classes I got to pay more attention to the new stuff alone before trying to apply them in the exercises. One thing that helped me was having the videos available afterwards, because before starting the final project I rewatched some classes to clear some doubts and remember details. 

But, also it was very interesting to meet other women in class, everyone had a different story and were there for several reasons. It was a good way to share our experiences and to get to know new people that are also new to the coding world.  

…and anyone who wants to can join us. This is a great idea because we continue to have scheduled time to focus on our coding skills.

I’m currently an Application Development Associate at Accenture, where I’ve been working for the past year and a half. During this time I have been implementing COBOL, which is a programming language mainly used in business and finance systems.

I’m going to try to take on new projects where I can implement web development or maybe take even more Javascript or React courses and start doing some freelancing to improve my skills and then finally take this career path. 

Do it! Even if you are not certain that development is the path for you…