S26:E2 - Freelancing While Homeschooling (Sarah Greer)

In this episode, Saron chats with Lead Web Developer, Sarah Greer. Sarah talks about her coding journey and how she juggled her passion for coding through freelancing while homeschooling her children. Sarah talks about why it was so important to her to learn to code and to have a career outside of having the title of “mom”. She also shares her experience going from freelancing to working full-time and the reasoning behind the switch. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) CSS HTML JavaScript

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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 freelancing while homeschooling with Sarah Greer, Web Developer at Data Driven Marketers.

[00:00:19] SG: I don’t know if it’s totally great to be defined by your job, but I just love this job so much. I would never do anything else. As a woman telling people you’re a web developer, I think it’s inspiring to other women, at least it would have been to me if I had heard that. I would have thought that was the coolest thing ever.

[00:00:37] SY: Sarah tells me how she was able to find something just for her through web development and why she made the switch from freelance to full time after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:00:53] SY: Thank you so much for joining us.

[00:00:54] SG: Thanks for having me.

[00:00:56] SY: So let’s start all the way at the beginning. Tell me a little bit about your interest as a kid. What were you into?

[00:01:02] SG: Oh, wow! As a kid, I was into reading. I loved reading. My first job, I was convinced I was going to be a disco dancer.

[00:01:10] SY: Oh, fun!

[00:01:12] SG: Yeah, not a lot of work going on now for that. We moved around a lot when I was a kid. I’ve lived in California, Ohio, Nebraska, Florida, and now I’m in Georgia.

[00:01:22] SY: Wow!

[00:01:23] SG: So yeah, I had kind of an interesting childhood, got to live on all four sides of the US and really reading was probably my number one thing all along. That was that consistency. There was always the characters in the books and I could take them with me. So that was my primary interest as a kid, but I did learning and school up until high school. Yeah, that was pretty much me. I wasn’t a big tech person for sure. I didn’t play a lot of video games. Game Boy, I didn’t have that, but I did like to get immersed in stories.

[00:01:59] SY: So I know that you went into sales as your first profession. How did you get into sales?

[00:02:06] SG: That was what was available at the time, interestingly enough. I sold furniture for a second and then cell phones and then the internet was starting to be this bigger thing, late ’90s. So I got in on the ground floor of that and I had an account so I knew exactly what it was I was selling. So I feel like I was a really good candidate for that and fortunately they agreed. So that’s how I got into that.

[00:02:30] SY: In the ground floor. Tell me more about that. How did you get your first opportunity?

[00:02:34] SG: My husband was working there. At the time he wasn’t my husband, he was just my boyfriend, but he was in tech support. So I kind of had a connection that way, but they were just looking for agents both in sales and customer service. And I felt like I would be a better person for sales because I was coming from selling cell phone service. So that was what I was used to and understanding, but I thought it would be easier because I would just be on the phone answering the calls. But because I really liked the service, I felt like it would be easy to sell because I used it so I could tell them anything they wanted to know.

[00:03:07] SY: And was your plan to stay in sales?

[00:03:10] SG: I don’t know. I mean, I was 21, 22. I don’t know if I had a plan to be honest. I just wanted to work at the same place my husband was working. And it was a really cool environment. They brought in food all the time. They didn’t have lights on. It was very underground and retro. It was just a really cool place to work. But I didn’t really have any aspirations to be in sales the rest of my life. I don’t think I had. Yeah.

[00:03:34] SY: And how long did you stay in that role for?

[00:03:36] SG: I was in sales for about a year and then moved into selling DSL. Because when I’m talking dial up accounts, that’s what we were selling. And then I moved into the DSL department, which was brand new, which was high speed. And then from there, I actually moved over to customer service. I didn’t like selling DSL because it was a much harder sell at that time. So I didn’t enjoy it.

[00:03:58] SY: So how did you end up getting into tech on the coding front?

[00:04:02] SG: Well, back when I was in sales, one of the perks of having an internet account was free web space, but nobody knew what that was. So I decided I would learn. I would figure out what that meant to have web space. And I learned how to build a website. I was using this old program called HotDog, and I just learned HTML enough to build a website and put it up there, and then I thought, “Well, this is really neat. I should make a website that’s about me that I can share with family because I was going to get married soon and we wanted to start a family.” So I thought that this was perfect. It not only gave me an opportunity to sell that account, but also to share that information, which I thought this is the future. It’s easier than printing pictures. You just put them all on the internet. So that’s how I got started.

[00:04:52] SY: And when you were learning these things, how were you doing that learning? I feel like these days we’re so spoiled with tutorials and forums and communities and all these kinds of places to go. But back then when the internet is just getting started, where did you go to learn how to do these things?

[00:05:07] SG: I think it was just the program because there weren’t resources on the internet. I probably bought a book as well. Maybe something like Internet for Dummies or Websites for Dummies, but I’m not even a hundred percent sure. When I want to know something, when I want to learn something, I’ll make it happen. So I just took it upon myself to figure out what out there is about HTML and how can I get started. And I was just figuring out how to make buttons that would change in some way when you touch them. So CSS was just starting and I was starting to get in on that.

[00:05:41] SY: And you mentioned that you were getting married, you were hoping to start a family, you wanted to share these moments, what were some of the things that you put on your website?

[00:05:48] SG: I shared updates for when I was pregnant, I shared my birth plan, stuff like that. I would share photos of me along the way because not all of our family was living here, so I was hoping they’d be able to see it, although a lot of them didn’t have the internet. And then when he was born, my son was born, I shared photos of him. Another thing I put up there was sports photography. I really loved to take photos of the local sports teams. We had a hockey team at the time. And I really enjoyed taking those photos and sharing them to a certain extent, even sharing them with the team, though I didn’t realize that they would be clever enough to find the parts that were personal. So then they knew a lot about my pregnancy. They were very kind about it, but it was like, “Oh, maybe I’m putting a little too much on the internet.” [00:06:37] SY: Yeah. Yeah. No, I understand that.

[00:06:39] SG: For a long time, I thought maybe I’ll be a photographer, but it was very hard to get into sports photography as a woman, especially at that time. And then I really didn’t like to take photos of anything else, my babies, but I wasn’t into taking photos of weddings and things like that. So that kind of went to the wayside.

[00:06:58] SY: Got you. Got you. Okay. So you have this website, you’re taking these photos, you’re showing them off. Were you intending on switching careers at this point or what was kind of the motivation behind this new hobby that you had?

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