Words I never thought I’d write in an email to my boss – “I like coding a little more than I want to admit”. Those words were actually typed by the same hands typing this post in the days following my attendance at WITness Success back in July. Did I just become an Accidental Developer?!?!?
Let’s unpack my experience with code and see if I might have fallen in love with a new side of the tool I love so much, shall we?
Kudos to the RAD Women Code team for their WITness Success sessions in the education track – I was inspired to DevelUP and got some hands-on training with an OOP Programming session that has me wanting to hit submit on an application to join an upcoming cohort (Intro to Coding) to learn more about becoming a Salesforce Developer. Their practical application style had me understanding why List<OrderItem> newBouquets = new List<OrderItem>(); creates a new list to store created orders. They broke down the building blocks of the code and left me wanting to learn more!
And then there is the Solution Architect that was on my last project. He gave me credit for things I didn’t realize I knew how to do and I did them, in code! The project before that, I was building a Visualforce Page on the fly during go-live support when the community pointed end-users to a non-existent community page. And before that, writing a company website in Apex with no real clue what I was doing aside from copy/paste and magic!, it worked.
My personal unpacking of these experiences tell me that my Admineloper Skills Matrix is probably decently colored in with things that I know how to do, but could I apply them on the fly? Likely not. Becoming an “accidental developer” takes a bit more work than that, but it is a start to something that could be my next career move.
It probably makes sense to start paying more attention to @RADWomenCode and get the recommended Trailhead badges before I apply for their sessions, but I am not as intimidated by methods and variables and triggers as I was a month ago. For now, I’m going to stick to my happy medium of “I know enough to be dangerous” and then see where future projects take me. I can’t grow if I don’t try, right? But don’t worry, I’m not jumping off the admin boat any time soon!
What about YOU? What are your career goals in the ecosystem? What are you doing to make them happen?