I have a degree in painting. A couple of years after graduating, I decided that I needed a portfolio website. I had no money, so I figured I would try building

I have a degree in painting. A couple of years after graduating, I decided that I needed a portfolio website. I had no money, so I figured I would try building it myself. I knew literally nothing about code at this point. But I struggled through it with W3schools (this was 2011, before the fancy learning platforms). The hardest part was fighting my own lack of confidence, because I had been made to believe that I was artistic and therefore bad at math and science. I never realized until that point how deeply I had absorbed this idea. Pushing past it has been a marvelous experience. Anyways, I realized that I really enjoyed writing code. The next year, in 2012, I started learning JavaScript. About a year and a half later, I met someone who got me a junior dev job at a startup in NYC. Been doing the startup thing ever since. As far as applying my artistic knowledge to IT work, I'd say it's been a struggle to stop applying it. At first, my approach was very creative, and I quickly saw how disastrous that is when you're working in a team. I would catch myself trying to find some other way of solving a problem than my co-workers, because I didn't want to "copy" their work. Solving artistic problems means finding your own unique solution, but solving programming problems means almost the exact opposite. There are other areas in which my creative side does come out though. I recently had a job where we had to reverse engineer a financial API that was not public. This sort of quasi-hacking is kind of perfect for creative people because it forces you to think outside the box.