Managing Code School and a Thai Restaurant

After receiving degrees in psychology and Japanese, Saki and her mom decided to open up Chada Thai. After 10 years of managing, collaborating, and cleaning a spill or two Saki realized she was living her mom’s dream and not hers. She wanted her own path. In this post Saki, now a software engineer at Ling, breaks down her journey into tech all while still managing Chada Thai and making her passions into her career.

Chada Code

Saki was struggling to figure out what her passions were. She knew she wanted to do something on her own, so she broke it down to what her passions were. After some research she recognized how critical developers are to a range of companies. From fashion to language Saki knew she could eventually find a company she was passionate about. All she needed now was the developer education. This is where she came across Turing School of Software and Design.

“So the reason why I even heard of it is because I had a couple of friends go there….high school friends who also had a similar story to me. They didn't really know where they were going in life and what they wanted to do for a career.” 

After researching various companies she was interested in, learning from friends’ Turing experience, and having a touch of code experience from the MySpace (thank you, Tom!) days she knew Turing was going to be part of her path. Despite being able to jump into Turing with no experience Saki is a self described “over planner”. Before starting and making the decision to join she took courses at Udemy to get familiar with JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. 

“I'm a person who is an over planner. I never step into anything without really knowing what I'm getting into. So, I found that doing a little bit of pre-work and learning what JavaScript is and things like that helped a lot into my transition to begin Turing.”

Daily Special: Organization

Managing a restaurant is no easy task, and Saki quickly realized what made her and her mom successful in the restaurant business was going to prove to be pivotal in her tech journey.

“I would say that the number one thing I noticed that I didn't realize would potentially help me in coding is that I'm very organized.”

Having a background in management, a lot of soft skills within software development were second nature. Saki was able to communicate effectively with other people, work collaboratively, document notes/ideas, and hold to a schedule. Keep in mind, all this was done all while still working at the restaurant, so she not only organized her work life to a T but also her Turing life. OH, and she was a new mom! But she didn’t reveal that til later.

“I'm very good at time management. So the key for me was just organizing my time at Turing, organizing my time at the restaurant, and making sure that I did a lot of pre-work, so that I wasn't completely lost when we were in class. I used class time more for me to ask questions about the work that I had just done for it. And just being really organized helped me a lot.”

Community Channel Watch

Saki managed her time in a way that allowed her to work day and night, but she was surprised by how interactive the Turing community was. 

“I really, really enjoyed that aspect, like, the community part, the support that I got from random strangers on the internet. I thought that was really cool.”

However, it wasn’t all work all the time. She appreciated how tight-knit her cohort was and all the avenues of fun that took place. 

“We had a fun channel where we just post random things. And then we also had a cohort game channel where we get together and play games... I didn't have so much time for that stuff because I was really busy, but I did enjoy watching other people post and interacting.”

Post Turing

Being a recent grad Saki was well aware of the current job market and how competitive it is, so she began her search early. The Turing program is split into 4 Modules and Saki hit the ground running networking and fine tuning her LinkedIn during Module 2. She wanted to start the conversation early to get an idea of what the job hunt was like so when her first interview came in Mod 3 she was prepared. However, like any good software developer during the first interview, she bombed it.

“Didn't get the job obviously, but it was a really good experience. I enjoyed actually being able to see what it was like to interview...., so that's kind of where my official job hunt started. ”

After graduation Saki wanted to keep coding, so she enrolled in a women’s hackathon in order to get another project rolling while on the job hunt. The job hunt can feel like being in limbo, with various avenues to explore and many different things vying for your attention. Saki found it helpful to look into organizations like Women Who Code for opportunities and keeping her coding and networking skills sharp

Passion to Career

Narrowing down her job search to companies that fit her interests and passions Saki was able to land a role at Ling. What makes Ling unique in the language learning space is that they focus on languages that aren’t taught as frequently. So, a lot of Southeast Asian, Eastern European, and African languages are just some examples of what is on their platform. Prior to narrowing down her search she was applying to everywhere and anywhere and wasn’t finding much success.

“I decided to only focus on what are my passions, what companies do I actually want to work for?”

At Ling she’s been able to make a large impact looking at the product as a user and as someone who loves learning languages. recently , Saki was placed on a large project where she was initially going to pair with a senior engineer, however because of an increase in workload it ended up being just her. So, capitalizing on her previous experience and new education she took on this project with confidence. A career milestone for her was having that code she worked on recently be merged into production and being able to see it user side and think about all the people around the world doing the same.

Oh yeah, Saki had a Newborn Baby Too!

“I had a baby. I was still working. I was doing Turing and the job hunt. You can do it. No matter what's going on in your life, if you want a career change, things might be crazy, but you can do it. I did it.”

Calls to Action

Ready to start your journey in software development? Sign up for a Try Coding workshop—or join the Turing cohort that starts in August. 

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