Yeah, I sometimes get goosebumps about it, because it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, and it’s absolutely – I know Tracy Lee is going to give a talk about this… It has changed my life in so many different ways and so many good ways. But the back-story on that, for people who haven’t heard - so yeah, I’ve spent the majority of my life as a competitive figure skater, and I went to college, but the plan was kind if just that I was gonna coach for the rest of my life… My parents did not really push me too hard academically, and I thought, you know, “Yeah, I probably will just coach…” This was my life.

[ ] I traveled around competing, and I made it really far, but – my junior year in college is when I kind of thought, you know, I had been through so many injuries, and I just kind of wanted to do something very different than what I’d done all my life… But at that point it was too late to change majors. So I finished out what I was doing, and I started working for an advertising agency, so I ended up doing marketing type stuff, and that’s how I kind of got turned on into programming.

There was a developer that I was working with, and the story really was that I was doing marketing/project management; it was a very small agency, so we’d wear a lot of hats… And we had our won site which was written in ExpressionEngine, and we had changed addresses, and the phone number had changed, and I got tired of asking the developers to go in and update it… And we couldn’t actually change it like just in the CMS portion, we actually had to change some stuff in the code… So I went home one weekend, I thought “I’m so tired of asking this… I’m gonna figure out how to do it myself.” And I did that, and I was hooked. I had to make the changes on the live site, but I was absolutely hooked.

So a couple weeks of that, I started going back to school for a second bachelor’s degree, but just not going fast enough… I started going to meetups and talking to other developers. The stuff that I was hearing at the meetups they had no clue about in school, and so that’s when I decided to do the bootcamp route. I went to a six-month one in Nashville, and I was one of the very first cohorts; I was cohort 4. I really got in at the right time, I think, and it has changed my life in so many ways… Whether it be able to – one of the very empowering things for anybody, not just a woman… But to be a woman and be able to support myself - there’s so much freedom in that. I’ve just bought a house…