The How?

STUDENT PHASE:

Starting from scratch without any technical background and trying to learn programming was a bit scary for me initially. I took the first step and started reading about python in my free time. Python is heavily used in the animation industry and it has the reputation of the language for beginners and experts as well. It was the year of 2012, I just finished working on the movie life of pi and we have a bit of down time in office. Luckily, this is the time when MOOCs are starting online and coursera started Interactive Programming with Python (back then it was a single course). I, along with few of my friends at work joined it.

The course was amazing. Instead of teaching in the traditional way about computer science, they taught by creating games. The lectures were short and didn’t dwell too much into the core concepts, which is good because learning all about computer science in a 9 week course and that too over an online MOOCs would have been a disaster. The lecturers made it really easy by dividing the core concepts and attaching an assignment of making a game each week. Working on the assignments along with friends was fun. I finished the course and got certification.

my first coursera certification in python

IMPOSTER PHASE:

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” is so true. Once I am back on the new project, because of the newly learned programming skill, every task which is either time taking or complex looked like a problem to be ‘fixed’. But, with the beginner knowledge I have, all I could do was modify a few lines and customize the existing tool or copy code from couple of places and create a new one. No one seems to be excited about these, except me. But I wasn’t disappointed. I just kept creating more tools which no one cared about. For others it might look stupid but for me it’s the most important thing because I was practising what I learned and studying the code others wrote.

PROGRAMMER PHASE:

Few months later I moved to a new department where they are using a software which is not yet integrated into the workflow and they are doing a lot of work manually. I saw that as a huge opportunity and thought, If I could crack this thing and create tools, I will make huge impact, because these are the tools which people actually care about and use in production.

I started on creating the tools all by myself. I worked during nights and slept in the office, worked on weekends, because I still have to work on my regular artist tasks during the day. So, by day I was an artist and by night am a ‘self designated programmer’. I was able to finish all the tools within few weeks and the project went real smooth because of the automation. The team loved it and I got good appreciation. I was ecstatic that I did something substantially valuable. I got the real taste of programming and a sense of confidence.

Then things moved very quickly. The technology department came to know about me and I was given official training to move into their department. Later I was lucky to join a new start-up animation studio in a technical position where am taking care of the programming and system administration needs. This pushed me in all possible directions and learned a ton of technologies and implemented lot of tools and work-flows.