I once dreamed of being an astronomer. Then an oncologist. Then an EMT. At no point on that list was “web developer”. And yet six years into this career, it’s the one that stuck, the one I’d choose again, and the one that’s taught me the most about who I actually am when nobody’s watching to see if I’ll quit.

How It Started

I came in with a handful of courses under my belt and not much else. My boss, Nathan, gave me my first real opportunity before I had anything to prove. He didn’t hand me expertise, he handed me trust, and the room to build competence on my own terms. I remember playing Typer Shark during a slow stretch of training, which tells you exactly how far from “developer” I actually was on day one.

What followed wasn’t a straight path into development. For about three years, my job was reading client emails, debugging issues, and troubleshooting queries. It was unglamorous, detail heavy work that never once felt like it was leading anywhere in particular. It was only after those three years that I got my first real development project. Looking back, that stretch wasn’t a delay. It was the part of the job where I actually learned the product, the clients, and my own patience, long before I ever touched a line of code that shipped.

Why Giving Up Was Never on the Table

Those three years taught me something that’s stayed with me ever since: whatever the challenge in front of me, walking away from it was never actually an option. When a client brings you a broken site or a query that’s costing them money, that’s not an abstract problem. It’s someone’s reputation, someone’s job, someone’s income sitting on the other end of whether I get it resolved. That weight is what made “figure it out” a requirement rather than an aspiration. It’s also what made the hard days worth pushing through, knowing the work mattered to someone beyond me.

Walking Into a Room Full of Men

I’ve spent most of this career as the only woman at the table in technical conversations. What I’ve learned there isn’t a trick for commanding a room. It’s that criticism taken straight rather than personally is one of the fastest ways to get better at anything. Every piece of feedback I didn’t flinch from became something I could actually use. That’s not a woman in tech lesson specifically, it’s just true. I’ll say it mattered more, in those rooms, that I’d trained myself to hear feedback as information rather than judgment. It meant I could keep building instead of getting stuck defending myself.

What Carried Me Through

If there’s a throughline across six years, the training desk, the three years of client troubleshooting, the first project, and everything since, it’s that people kept believing in me before I’d fully earned it. Not because I was the exception in the room, but because they saw someone willing to learn and decided that was worth investing in. Nathan started it. Others kept it going. I don’t think I’d have stayed in this field without that.

A Word for Women Considering This Path

You don’t need a childhood dream that points straight at this career for it to end up being yours. I didn’t have one. What mattered more was starting somewhere small, taking feedback as fuel instead of a verdict, and refusing to walk away when the problem in front of me was hard because someone was always counting on it getting solved.

Women currently make up about a third of web developers, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, closer to parity than the field’s reputation suggests. Find people willing to invest in you before you’ve proven anything. Trust that the unglamorous years count. Know that your place in this field is built, not born.