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Diving into the world of supernerds

Written by Rosien van Toor on 26th May 2016

• learning to code

I just finished my second week at Spindle. I’m not sure how I ended up here, but I do know that I’d like to stay for a while.

A few years ago, I graduated as a historian with a degree in military history, then traveled for a while and became a scuba dive instructor. If anything, you’d expect to find me underwater or in a dusty archive, not in a shack full of nerds. What happened?

To ward off the boredom while applying for new jobs, I started to teach myself how to code. Nothing fancy, just some tutorials at Codecademy and FreeCodeCamp, with the main motivation that this was a long overdue twenty-first-century skill that I ought to pick up. Now I had all the time in the world to actually learn something new. This was about four months ago. It was just messing around, trying to make a bit more sense of computers, and I never had the intention to turn it into a new career. This is what happened with diving too. That also started as something new and cool and fun to learn, when I realized that people actually do this for a living. That’s how I became a dive instructor.

Of course, I knew that people developed software for a living, but that was for other people. For nerds. For people that survive on coffee and frantically type code into little black screens and make magic happen, but definitely not for me. At least that’s what I thought until I learned that Spindle was looking for someone that wanted to become a developer. Basically, someone doing what I was doing already but as a job. And, more importantly, with a whole team of awfully cool supernerd colleagues that are here to help me out when I can’t figure out why my code doesn’t work, when I accidentally knock over a PC and kill the hard drive or just to tell me where to get good coffee.

So, what am I doing at Spindle?

My first two weeks here were mostly spent getting to know the organization (and getting familiar with Holacracy), my colleagues, my work environment and of course, learning to code! We decided that it would be fun to blog about my experience as a supernerd-to-be, so why not build a blog, with a content management system behind it and everything? That’s my first project, and maybe I’ll show it to you in the future. For now, it is still very obvious that it was made by someone that doesn’t quite know what she’s doing yet. In the meantime I find myself typing more code into little black screens, drinking more coffee and well, slowly but surely becoming more of a supernerd, although there’s still a long, long way to go.