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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

A year and a half ago, my wife, Kristen, was an English teacher. Now she is a full-time software engineer at Microsoft. I followed her journey with excitement as she went from writing her first “Hello World” program, then her first full stack web app, to getting an apprenticeship and finally a full time job.

Damn that is impressive

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Is it a case of who you know?

It's not in the sense that I didn't have any connections and she got in on her own. It is in the sense that I have a CS degree and have worked in industry. I helped her on occasion get past a bad explanation in a tutorial and I could talk her through how technical interviews work.

I think a post from you and her on what she did during that year between deciding to enter tech and getting the job at Microsoft would be incredibly interesting and helpful.

Particularly, what resources did she use? More top down things (Udacity, FreeCodeCamp, jumping into building projects), or bottom up (online computer science classes, Berkeley CS61, SICP, etc).

Thanks!

The article has a link to her blog in that first paragraph (though links on Medium don't stand out that much). FreeCodeCamp was one of a number of things she did.

I read both your posts and her series of blog posts which where interesting to follow along. It wasn't clear to the reader how it is that she got past the HR screening for Microsoft as a non-cs graduate. I'm starting to believe that maybe she made a good impression by doing that class under that MS engineer who then made her students interview with actual Microsoft employees?

She has a new blog post, which may answer this more.

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