Why I Almost Didn't Choose Computer Science

I wanted to be an astronaut. Not metaphorically actually. Aerospace engineering, a scientist, something that felt big and far away from everything around me. But life rarely executes the plan you draw for it. Fortunately or unfortunately, I ended up in a computer science engineering classroom instead. I hated it, at first. I remember sitting in front of a screen those first months thinking, this isn't me. I couldn't picture myself as someone who just sits and types all day. It felt mechanical. Not creative. Not me.

Then in my second year, almost by accident, I walked into a lab session on building an Android app. And something in me just paused. I thought okay, I've already crossed a year of this. Why not give it one real try? If it doesn't feel right, I can always quit later.

I never quit.

I fell into it the way you fall into something you didn't expect to love. Android apps led to Flutter, cross platform builds, even a small app I built that made it into an Apple conference submission. Then web development pulled me in. I was building, breaking, learning genuinely enjoying the chaos of it.
And then, right at the edge of graduation, the boredom crept back in. No job offer. No clear next step. Just me, staring at a future that suddenly felt very uncertain.

That's when a friend said one sentence that changed everything: "Why don't you try cloud?" I had no idea what that meant, practically. But I trusted him, and I started. Somewhere in those early days of learning, I found a DevOps and cloud YouTuber I followed religiously. In one of his videos, he mentioned something called the AWS Community Builder program. And if I'm honest the thing that hooked me wasn't community, or contribution, or any noble reason. It was the $500 in AWS credits. I knew exactly how painful it felt to watch a cloud bill creep up with money I didn't have.

So that became my quiet goal. One day, I'll be a Community Builder. For the credits, if nothing else.But goals shift the longer you chase them. Somewhere between writing my first blog post and my fiftieth, I noticed something I hadn't expected sharing what I struggled with was helping other people, not just me. The selfish reason quietly turned into something else. I wasn't writing for the credits anymore. I was writing because someone, somewhere, was stuck exactly where I had been.

If I could sit across from a woman just starting in tech today, here's what I'd actually tell her.

Don't start with the tool. I've watched so many people try to become an expert in Linux, then Docker, then GitHub Actions each one in isolation, as if they were unrelated skills to collect. They're not. They're connected. Understand Linux. Then version control. Then cloud. Then CI/CD. Then containers. Then orchestration. Build the foundation before you chase the shiny tool everyone's talking about.

I'm not the best cloud engineer out there. I want to be honest about that. But what actually moved the needle for me wasn't memorizing every tool it was learning concepts first, and then building something real with them. Not tutorials. Real problems. The thing at work that was annoying me, the manual task I kept repeating those became my projects.

And build in public. Whatever you're struggling with right now, whatever half-finished thing you're learning post it anyway. Don't wait until it's polished. That habit alone will teach you more about what you actually understand than any course will.

On the days I feel low, I do something a little strange. I open an incognito browser window and type my own name into the search bar. I look at what comes up the things I've actually built, written, shared. It's a small reminder that I'm not starting from zero, even on the days it feels exactly like that.

Stay curious. Believe in progress, not in some perfect process. You won't always be consistent work happens, life happens but share what you can, when you can. That small, imperfect habit of curiosity is what eventually connects you to the people who think the way you do.