From Teaching English language to Computer Programming
There are many different path ways to enter the field of computer programming — see this talk by Anjana Vakil .
a MS in computational linguistics at Saarland University in Germany, where I studied speech technology, machine learning, and computer-assisted language learning. Prior to that, I earned a BA in philosophy from UC Berkeley, studying formal logic and the philosophy of mind and language. I later worked in sales for a SaaS company in San Francisco, and taught English as a foreign language in SF and Vietnam. Meanwhile, I taught myself Python on the side, which ultimately led me to computational linguistics.
In grad school I fell in love with software development, so I spent the fall of 2015 at the Recurse Center, honing my coding skills by working on: improving my JavaScript fluency, writing functional code, contributing to open-source projects like Zulip, exploring CPython internals, visualizing data with libraries like D3, and making test-driven development a habit.