Really awesome class, learned about variables, objects, functions and other fundamentals. Our instructor was Bri, first time taking a class with a queer and female instructor and she made it so fun and accessible, had zero ego, and was generally really kind. In the past I might've assumed that compassion and emotional intelligence was not something I would find anywhere in the tech space - but I can see firsthand how this is changing. It's easy to see with the culture at places like Stack Overflow and Reddit how software engineering has been gatekept from women, queer people, people of color, or anyone who doesn't fit the bill. I think this is especially unfortunate because as a Latinx trans person I believe we can bring something to the tech space that no one else can. Some of us have had to find the loops holes in society to survive. If resilience, adaptability, creative problem-solving, persistence, and empathy are some of the important characteristics of a good software engineer, then those of us who've lived without resources would be excellent for this job.

Right now I'm in the process of applying for a scholarship for the CodeSmith CS Prep course starting in August. I'm digging deeper into functions and finally starting to have fun as my understanding increases. What I really need to work on is on my technical communication, so I'm going back through CSX and re-doing all the problems while dictating outloud each line of code. Hopefully between now the beginning of class I will be more comfortable with this part of it.