S23:E7 - How a Single Mom in a Shelter Became a Successful Software Developer (Brittney Ball)

Saron sits down with Brittney Ball, Documentation Engineer at Meta. Brittney shares her experience going from being a homeless single mom living in a shelter to a Software Engineer. She talks about her journey to get to where she is today, the role a viral tweet played in kick-starting her coding journey, tips for those who are self-taught to stand out when job searching, and what a Documentation Engineer is. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Brittney Ball Blog Documentation Engineering Charlotte Developers Lynda.com HTML JavaScript Year Up

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[00:00:05] SY: Welcome to the CodeNewbie Podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I’m your host, Saron, and today we’re talking about going from being a homeless single mom to being a software engineer with Brittney Ball, Documentation Engineer at Meta.

[00:00:20] BB: While I was learning and developing my skills, I was also bringing in other people who had similar interest and didn’t have access to certain things. I was bringing them in, we were studying together, and this created a pipeline for those individuals in the community that didn’t come from a university or didn’t come from this coding bootcamp.

[00:00:45] SY: Brittney talks about the Year Up Program and her coding journey after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:00:56] SY: Thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:57] BB: Thank you for having me. I’m very excited.

[00:01:00] SY: So you say that you got into tech because of survival. What does that mean?

[00:01:04] BB: At that time, I wasn’t really looking for a career, it’s more so like being homeless and having to find a career for my child. I was pregnant and I was in this shelter for women and children. And once I had the baby, they told me that I had to either enroll into college courses or get a job or something. At this time, like college wasn’t for me because I had to take care of a baby by myself. And so I didn’t have the time to go to college. And then with the shelter I stayed in, they had curfew. So I couldn’t work a night job. And so I had to choose something that would benefit my situation and that’s when I found a program called Year Up, which actually gave me a stipend while learning how to actually build computers. So it was more hardware. So that really benefited me at that time because I got a check and I was also able to learn something that would help me I didn’t know in the future get into coding.

[00:02:14] SY: You chose the path less traveled, decided to focus your time on learning about technology. Tell me a little bit more about how you picked the Year Up Program. What was that about?

[00:02:23] BB: It was one night I was just sitting in my room and I was like, “Okay, baby’s almost here. I need to find a career field that I can do that will have a salary with benefits right off and I won’t miss too much of his life.” And so I started Googling and I found the Year Up Program. At this point, it was like A+ certification, network plus focus, and I signed up and I did that. But once I got to the internship part of that, so Year Up is six months of training and six months internship. And once I got to the internship portion of my training, I did my job so well that my then manager challenged me to learn JavaScript. He said that if I could learn JavaScript by the end of my internship, he would offer me a full-time position as a junior software engineer.

[00:03:21] SY: Wow!

[00:03:21] BB: Yeah. So with my situation, living in a shelter with a baby, I was up to that because that meant benefits for my baby. I was able to get that job at the end of my graduation of the Year Up Program, which software engineering at the time was not even a pathway that they supported.

[00:03:42] SY: Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about what the program taught. You mentioned some certifications. What kinds of curriculum was it?

[00:03:48] BB: It was more of hardware, learning the ins and outs of the computer, how to build a computer. It wasn’t so much coding. It was more of like hard skills, some HR help desk type of training, customer service facing type of thing. It wasn’t like a coding or UX design or anything like that at that moment.

[00:04:13] SY: So how would you compare what you were learning in Year Up with what you were learning on your own via the JavaScript that you had to level up on?

[00:04:22] BB: It was challenging. It was totally different. And at the time, I had created A+ study group at Year Up. We were all studying for our A+ certification, and so it was a bunch of my friends and I had booked different little cafes for us to come and hang out at and we would hang out there and study. But once I went over to the coding, I had maybe one or two people that were interested in coding and we would do like HTML or things like that. That was the introduction to that. Once my manager proposed that challenge for me, I found like one person that was also interested in, we made simple HTML sites together.

[00:05:07] SY: Tell me about what your experience was like leveling up and learning JavaScript on your own? How did you do that? How did you even know where to begin?

[00:05:15] BB: It was challenging. First of all, when he introduced me to it, that was the first time I ever heard of coding. I had to do a lot of Googling and YouTubeing and YouTube was like my number one source, YouTube and Lynda.com. I give them all the credit because without them, I don’t think I would’ve been able to secure that full-time position as a junior software engineer because I used Lynda and YouTube as my resources to learn JavaScript and I’m a visual learner. And so I had to watch a lot of videos and actually go back and replicate what they did. I’m a very hands-on and so that really helped me a lot during that learning process. And so yeah, that was my main sources. That was how I learned.

[00:06:06] SY: Tell me about what happened next. You spent that time learning JavaScript. You got ready. You went back to your supervisor. Then what happened?

[00:06:14] BB: At the end of my internship, I was able to secure the position and I was there for I believe two years and then I got pregnant with my second son. And that was a very hard pregnancy for me. And I got really sick in the beginning of that pregnancy. And so I was put on bedrest really early in that pregnancy. And so I had to leave that company. With leaving that company, that put a lot of strain on me because I just broke into tech and now I’m about to have another baby. From there, I did a freelance work while I was working from home and throwing little side projects, but it wasn’t enough. And once I had my second son, Sebastian, it was really hard to find another full-time position with me not having any certifications with me, not having any kind of college background. Not a lot of companies would give me the opportunity to be full-time. They would hire me on as a contractor. But when it came down to getting benefits and things like that, because I didn’t have any kind of backing behind me, a lot of companies wouldn’t do it. So at one point, I just got tired of being a contractor and so I decided to, when I got my tax refund, to pack up my car, my little car and take my kids to North Carolina.

[00:07:47] SY: Wow! Why North Carolina?

[00:07:49] BB: I had heard that Charlotte, North Carolina was a new rising tech hub and all of the companies were eventually going to move there. And so I wanted to be where it was happening at and I wanted to have a company take a chance on me. And so I took a chance on myself. I went there with my kids and everything I had in my car and my dad lived there too. So I had someone there, but I basically had to depend on myself to secure a place and find a job. So I was there one day, I found an apartment the next day. After I was in my apartment for about a week, I went with my resume in hand and started knocking on these company’s doors and I Googled tech startups in Charlotte and reached out to people that work for them via LinkedIn and actually went there with my resume and started knocking on doors.

[00:08:50] SY: Literally?

[00:08:51] BB: Yes, literally.

[00:08:52] SY: Wow!

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