 as a music publicist in Nashville. Now I work as a software engineer on the UX team at Crowdstrike, where a cybersecurity company aiming to stop breaches. It still makes me so proud to say that I'm a software engineer and if you told me a few years ago that's what I'd be doing now, I would have laughed. I had no idea what JavaScript was or why even HTML or CSS were. I was completely oblivious to the tech industry even though it was all around me. And that's really funny to me now because I'm so immersed in the tech world. To give you a little bit more insight into what I do, besides working on an awesome product at Crowdstrike, I also blog on Dev. I write articles aimed towards beginners and I'm also a co-organizer for the Nashville Women Programmers Meetup Group. My life now revolves around the tech industry and I'm really proud of that. But I wouldn't be here talking to you today if I hadn't pursued becoming a ballerina or working as a music artist first. My life has really come full circle. I started out performing in front of an audience on stage and here I am in front of an audience again just this time giving a tech talk. My past experiences make me the developer I am today. Those past careers gave me a perspective that no one else has and if you come from a different career path then you have those unique perspectives as well. But I want to take a moment and say that I'm not trying to put down anyone that has gone on a more traditional path and gotten that computer science degree. But being honest, I'm kind of jealous of y'all. I wish I discovered coding earlier in my life but I wouldn't trade the path that got me here for anything. Having a non-traditional background is an asset and I want to open up everyone's eyes that's watching this and show you that. The next time you're sitting in an interview with someone who doesn't have a computer science degree, I want you to think back to this talk and give that person a chance. Because by opening the doors to people from non-traditional backgrounds, you're opening yourself to a more diverse, inclusive, and well-rounded team. And that team will only improve your product even more. So here's the story of how I landed in tech. I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, doing ballet. I never took it very seriously until I was in high school, which has been an addition for the Louisville Ballet School's Summer Intensive. A summer intensive is like a summer camp for ballet. I'm pretty sure I was late to the audition. I had my hair and a ponytail. I did not want to go, but somehow I was still accepted. I really still don't want to go but my parents wanted me out of the house for three weeks so they kind of forced me to. But because of that, I started taking ballet way more seriously afterwards. When I returned home, I upped my dance classes to around 25 hours a week. And when I wasn't taking my own classes, I was being an assistant teacher for some of the younger level classes. I really improved a lot over the next few months because of that. Then, the summer before my senior year of high school, I auditioned for the Joffrey Ballet School's Summer Intensive. And while you're auditioning for their Summer Intensive, you could also audition for their year-round full-time trainee program. And a trainee is one of the first steps in becoming a professional dancer. I attended the summer program, but at first I didn't accept the traineeship. Even though you're a trainee for a company, you still have to pay for classes and it's really expensive. It was just too much for me and my family at the time. Plus, my family was also moving to Chicago and I wanted to move it with them. When I was there, I tried out various studios but I never really found one that fit. And I also had a hard time adjusting my new high school. I moved my senior year that something no kid wants to do. So I ended up moving by myself at 17 years old to New York City to do the Joffrey Ballet School traineeship. I was dancing five to six days a week from nine to five. I was taking two technique classes a day, a partnering class, variations where you learn solos from different ballets. I had rehearsal time and I even took a ballet history class. I did all of that while finishing my high school diploma online. And when the end of the semester was coming to a close, I knew I needed to make a decision. I wanted to go to college but I had to decide if I wanted to go and major in ballet, which is a real thing surprisingly, or if I wanted to go for something else. Throughout my time at Joffrey, I was getting a lot of shin splints and unfortunately a lot of those times they turn into stress fractures. Ballets really demand you physically. You're pushing your body, do things it's normally not supposed to do and there's obviously consequences to that. One injury can really kill your career so I decided I didn't want to pursue ballet anymore. It was a really hard decision for me. I was always known as the ballerina and I felt like I was losing a part of who I was but I knew it was the right decision for me. So I moved back home to Nashville and I rolled for my freshman year at Belmont University as a public relations major. I originally wanted nothing to do with the music industry but Belmont's a music school. A lot of kids go there for music so I kind of got wrapped into it. The music industry itself is just as competitive as if you're trying to be an artist. There aren't a lot of music publicity firms and even fewer that are hiring entry level assistants. I knew I needed to stand out from the crowd so I started interning my freshman year and continued to do so each semester until I graduated. It all paid off when I got a job as a publicity assistant at a social media marketing agency in Nashville shortly after graduating. A few months after landing that publicity assistant job I was promoted to being a full publicist. I was really living my dream. I was originally drawn to public relations because of Lauren Conrad and the show The Hills if y'all remember that. She made the job look really glamorous and it definitely was at times. I got to go to concerts for free, hang out with celebrities and be on red carpets. But it was also really stressful. When I was at those concerts I was always working typically doing a social media takeover on behalf of an artist or smoothing journalists until they could do an interview with my client after the show. When I was at the red carpets I'd be running ahead of my client on the carpet trying to get outlets to do an interview while also trying to monitor the interview my client was currently doing. When I wasn't at a concert or red carpet I was sending out emails to journalists to try to get more interviews or placements. I would send out hundreds of emails a day to journalists who would receive thousands of emails a day. It was a game of luck whether or not the journalists responded to me and I really hated that aspect of my job. I didn't like that someone else opening an email and saying yes to working with my client determined if I was doing well or not in my bosses and my client's eyes. My anxiety was at an all-time high and I dreaded going to work every single day. That's when I knew I needed something new. I had no idea what I wanted to do but I knew that I wanted to do something that was mentally challenging while also giving back to the people around me. I toyed around with the idea of working in HR and possibly even working in higher ed admissions no idea why I got those in my head but I started reaching out to people to start pursuing those ideas and that was when I stumbled upon Code Category. I don't really remember how I found it but I started teaching myself HTML and CSS. I loved the feeling of seeing something I created come to life in front of me. I did some googling and I realized this could be a career so I found as many people as I could and started setting up coffee dates so I could learn what it was like in their day-to-day life. That is the job where you're constantly learning but that there's also an amazing community of people that's supportive and one you can give back to and after hearing that I was hooked. I knew this was going to be my path. I had a new decision to make. How would I learn what I needed to in order to start this career? I'd only been graduated from Belmont for two years and I knew I didn't want to go back to school for another four so that option was out. I also knew that because of going to online school while I was at a job free that self-teaching wasn't really the best route for me so I started looking into boot camps. I found the iron yard and I immediately enrolled in their front-end engineering program. I was really drawn to their small class size and that I could fully solely focus on front-end development unlike some other programs I had looked into. All the staff that I'd met were super nice and welcoming and I knew that it was the place for me. My last day of being a music publicist on Friday, September 3rd, 2016 and then I started my classes at iron yard that following Monday. I opened up my laptop that first day and it all hit me. I had just quit a job I'd been pursuing for multiple years all throughout college and I worked really hard towards for something that may not work out. I barely knew anything about the tech industry or what I was getting myself into. And those three months at the iron yard were hard. I learned all about HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It was like a fire hose of information constantly coming at me. Before I felt like I could completely grasp one concept we were already moving on to the next but the more I learned the more I fell in love with coding. And then towards the end of the program I started doing some interviews and I noticed a bit of a theme. After getting through three rounds in one interview I was told that although I did better than most of the other interviewers on the take-home test that I was still too green and I ran into similar problems throughout my job search. I got judged a lot for being a bootcamp graduate and when I tried to leverage the skills that I learned from ballet in my previous PR role I was told that they weren't relevant and those rejections really got me down. I felt like I was always immediately being judged because I didn't have the experience that they thought I should have for this type of role. But thankfully fast forward a bit I landed a job at an advertising agency where almost half the team were self-taught or bootcamp grads. I stayed there for almost two years before moving to my current position at Crowdstrike, another place that's extremely accepted of my non-traditional background. It still baffles me that I was judged for my weird past attack because through interviewing I realized that throughout my time being a ballerina and a music publicist that I was being taught these lessons that I had no idea would be useful in the tech world. Possibly the most surprising thing to me was how similar ballet and coding actually are. Becoming a ballerina takes a lot of practice. It looks really easy but that's only because the dancers want to make you think that. Thousands of hours go into becoming a professional ballerina. Girls and boys often start training around three years old to become a professional in their late teens to early 20s. But even when a ballerina becomes a professional it doesn't mean that they stop practicing or learning or try and get better. And the same thing happens as developers. We put in a lot of time learning various languages and frameworks. Take Emberg for instance. As much as I wish it was true you don't do a tutorial and become an expert overnight. A lot of time is put into mastering what we do. And even once you do become comfortable with something like Emberg it doesn't mean you stop practicing or trying to learn more. Doing tutorials and coding challenges is often how we as developers build our foundational knowledge and how we learn new things. And it's the same way with ballerinas. They start each day with a technique class going over the basics of ballet. This is how both ballerinas and developers continue to grow and learn throughout time. And this was something that was really hard for me to grasp when I first made the switch to tech. I knew I was competing against people who had done this for years. I wanted my code to be flawless the first time I ran it. But that doesn't happen. I love ballet because I knew I could always be learning and improving. And now I've come to learn that come to love the fact that with coding I'll be doing the same. I'll always be learning and practicing and that's amazing because that's always something I really enjoyed when I was doing ballet. It also taught me to pay attention to the small details. Ballet is extremely meticulous. And one of the basic moves in ballet is called a tendu. In French it means to stretch. It may seem like a very simple move but it's not. And even though I can't see you I want you to stand up and try to do one with me. So let me back up here. I know it's kind of hard to see me but you're going to start with your legs together and your hands on your hips. You want to make sure your abs are engaged and that your ribcage are closed. Next you're going to put your feet in first position which I know you may not be able to see my feet but it's like a tiny little V. And don't forget about your abs and your ribs. Those are still engaged. And then while standing here you're also going to make sure your inner thighs and your quads are engaged and lifted. But don't forget about your abs. The whole idea with ballet is to engage every single tiny muscle so you're appearing as tall as possible. And even just standing here like this is really hard and you're not even doing a tendu yet. It's not something natural for your body to do. So let's actually do a tendu now. While keeping everything engaged and lifted you're going to push your foot into the ground. Make sure your ball of the foot is really pushing in and then make sure your foot is pointed and fully stretched and turned out. You want to keep your leg turned out. But you can't forget about your inner thighs, your quads, your abs. Everything's still engaged and lifted. It's really hard. I'm going to make y'all sit down. I won't tour to you any longer. A more advanced move that starts out with a tendu is called a romper set and I will not make y'all try this one. When first learning to do one a lot of ballerinas make the mistake of not paying attention to the starting out in the tendu and instead focus on getting their leg up into that half turn. But paying attention to the small details of the tendu and activating every single one of your muscles really pushing your foot into the floor and pointing through your whole foot is what's giving you the power to do the move and execute it correctly. So how is this similar to coding? First of all there have been dozens of times I've overlooked something as simple as a semicolon. Half an hour later when my code isn't compiling I'm sitting there laughing at myself because I've realized what I missed. And I do the same thing with ballet. Whenever I was struggling with a certain move my teacher would have me take a step back and break it down piece by piece similar how to you review smaller sections of code when you find something's wrong. And a lot of times with ballet or code it's those small details that matter. And it's extra important when coding because those small details play into other decisions like if you install the extra dependency or not. Those decisions affect the people that use our product. They can cause things like performance issues and we need to take that into consideration. The small details make a difference in our day-to-day work and paying attention to them can save both you and your customers minutes or even sometimes hours of frustration. Possibly one of the biggest things ballet taught me was how to get feedback and not take it personally. Both ballet and coding are extremely personal. In ballet you're telling a story through your body and in coding you're building something from scratch. There's no such thing as being perfect in either ballet or in code. If I was in class at rehearsal and received no feedback then that was wasted time because I wasn't learning how to improve. And I feel the same way when I submit code for review. I want people to stress how I could have done something differently or catch a mistake I may have missed. I crave that feedback because a person is doing it because they want me to grow and learn. And a majority of the time when someone makes a comment on my code it's something that I hadn't realized before. You can't grow without that feedback. That's how ballerinas develop their artistry and how we as engineers develop better code. It may sound all the things ballet taught me but being a PR also taught me several things I use day-to-day as a developer. One of the things I constantly use from PR are my writing skills. Whether it was writing an email or writing pressure releases I was always writing. And when I was doing so as extremely particular not only about the words I was using but about how concise I was being. Selecting the right word to perfectly convey my message and keeping everything short and sweet could mean the difference between a journalist opening and reading my email and saying yes to an opportunity or not. And not only does that help me as someone who enjoys giving talks and writing blog posts but it helps me in my day-to-day life as a developer. As developers our day isn't spent exclusively writing code. We're commenting that code explaining to others why we chose something to do a particular way or even writing documentation. Being concise and clear doing those not only helps yourself when you come back to something you've worked on previously but helps anyone interacting with anything that you've done. PR also taught me how to work as a team. There's a thing about that people in PR or people in people who are developers excuse me do so because you don't want to work with others but I probably work with people more so now than I did when I was in PR. As a publicist I worked with managers record labels and marketing teams. We'd all work together to put it together to put together a vision for our artists and execute it correctly. Now as developers we do the same. Now the day goes by that I'm not reaching out to someone else on the team whether it be managers, designers, writers, researchers or other developers. Sometimes it's a question for a designer or sometimes it's pairing with another developer. As developers we're interacting with so many different people across so many different teams. It's vital to have those strong team working skills and that's something that really makes the difference between a good and a bad developer. Working as a publicist didn't only teach me things that I use in my day-to-day life as a dev but it also taught me really important things that were useful when I was interviewing. The first is that although I hated sending those hundreds of emails a day to journalists that it really taught me how to stand out amongst the crowd. All journalists routinely receive a ton of emails a day from publicists buying for their attention and maybe become creative not only my pitches but even the subject lines on my emails. Something as simple as including hello and the journalist's name was unique enough to get me a couple more views that I wasn't getting before. I took what I learned and I applied it when I was first shop searching. There are a lot of developer roles out there but also a lot of people applying for the same role. I wanted to make sure that my application was unique so when I was applying for jobs I created a custom email template that I'd send along with my resume. It included the company's logo and then was all done in their brand colors. It was the most advanced thing it honestly wasn't the prettiest but it was enough to make me stand out. And when I would ask that company why they chose to interview me from a stack of applicants it was often because of those emails. The second thing that PR taught me is great interview skills. A big part of my job was training my clients how to interview. I'd help them practice the questions they typically get, how to answer something if they didn't know what to say, and how to weave their personal story throughout their interview. Developers are often most concerned with the technical interview which obviously is a big part of the interviewing process but in order to get there you have to get through that getting to know you interview first. So I took what I teach my clients and I applied that to myself. I thought about the common questions I'd be asked and I knew I'd always be asked about my career transition. So now when I'm asked to tell the interviewer little more about myself I talk about why I decided to make the switch. Then throughout the rest of my interview I talk about the things I learned from being a ballerina and a publicist and how that helps me as a developer. I tell a story in my interview much like I would teach my clients to do. One of the biggest takeaways I have from both Ballet and PR is that community is important. I didn't have a community either in my past careers. Ballet is extremely competitive. There's only so many roles and only so many spots in a company. Some companies even compete make you compete each year for what level you'll be within the company. And PR is the same way. Each publicist is vying for the attention of the same journalist. Besides the people I worked with I didn't really have anyone I could turn to and ask questions. I was amazed when I was at my boot camp seeing how supportive our community is through Twitter chats, Slack groups, meetups and conferences. It's a part of the reason why I wanted to be a co-organizer for the National Women Programmers. When I was a publicist I had to plan a lot of events. I did ice cream socials, invited journalists to music video shoots, and I even went bar hopping in a limo once. I really liked throwing events so now I applied those skills that I had from PR to our National Women Programmers meetup. And through that I'm able to show others how amazing of a community we have. Honestly I could probably go on for an hour about what Ballet and PR have taught me. There are so many more things that I've learned than what I've talked about. But my story is just one of a few people who now work in tech after previously coming from a non-traditional background. In fact, according to this 2019 Stack Overflow Survey, 37.6% of people working in tech now who have a college degree do not have a computer science degree. There are more people in tech who come from that non-traditional background than ever before. And with the popularity of boot camps and people self-teaching to make the switch, that number is only going to continue to grow. My aunt Denise is actually one of those people who made the switch to tech and I'm extremely proud of her. She left her job as a life insurance underwriter to attend Northwestern University's full Stack Bootcamp. And now she's working as a developer in Chicago that focuses on accessibility. My friend Amanda also taught herself to code while working in the outdoor recreation and customer service industries. Now she works as developer at Lewis Communications in Brentwood, Tennessee. Another amazing story is E. Keele. I was introduced to him through the weekly Code Newbies Twitter chats and I'm really fascinated about his story. He studied in Israel to originally become a rabbi, but then decided to attend the Flat Iron Schools Bootcamp in New York City. Now he works as a software engineer there and blogs about tech on his site Rabbi on Rails. These are just a few of the amazing stories of people who made the switch to tech. I posted on dev asking for more stories and I received so many responses. People who transition from being social media managers, teachers, translators, architects, musicians, aircraft maintenance engineers and more. We've heard time and time again that coding is the future. There are so many job opportunities in this field and that isn't stopping anytime soon. We need more candidates. So why do people have this mentality that someone who doesn't have a computer science degree doesn't belong? By saying that you're rejecting people like Keele, my Aunt Denise, Amanda, myself and so many more people who could only add to your team. So what can we do to make our hiring process more inclusive to those who have non-traditional backgrounds? Doing something as simple as removing the requirement of having a computer science degree from your listing will attract even more applicants. There's been numerous times when I haven't applied to a job listing because it had a CS degree requirement. Then during your interviews assess candidates for their potential. We downplay having strong soft skills in tech, but we shouldn't be. Those soft skills are things like problem solving, initiative to learn and mentoring others and those are transferable. Don't put as much emphasis on a candidate's potential. Don't put as much emphasis on candidates credentials, I mean, but instead take a look at those transferable skills. Your tech stack can always be taught, but those other skills but those transferable skills are the ones that are tougher to learn and in my opinion are what makes a really good candidate become a really great candidate. If you're on the other end of the spectrum and searching for a job when you don't have a CS degree, take a step back and look at what you've done in the past. Do what I've done in this talk. See where you can pull similarities from your past experiences and use those to your advantage. We have those things you've learned throughout your interviews to show how much of an asset you can be and prove that even though you may be new to their team now that eventually you're going to be their next senior engineer. So as a former ballerina turn music publicist turn software engineer if I can find similarities through those three very drastic careers then anybody else can. Those past experiences give me the strength in my career as a developer and they shouldn't be treated as if they don't. Thank you so much.