🎓 The end of the bootcamp, the beginning of my real tech path

When finishing your studies is, in fact, the real beginning.

When the fear weighs a lot, but the desire weighs more

I started this road with a huge amount of doubts, fears, uncertainty and very little faith in myself. But also with one certainty: I needed to do it to climb out of the hole I felt I was in.

I knew it was not going to be easy. And it was not.

There were many moments of despair. I thought I was old, incapable. I thought maybe I was taking the wrong path again. I was only clear about one thing: I did not like my profession… and I loved this.

But this field has a lot of FOMO.

There are thousands of languages. You see job ads asking for 400 technologies you do not know, and you do not even feel you have a good grasp of the one you are studying. Every day AI releases something new. Every day there are more tech profiles that make you doubt yourself: Twitch this, Discord that, and who knows what else… so many channels, so many content creators, so much information.

And careful, I am not saying it is a bad thing. But it is overwhelming.

Sometimes the sheer amount of information makes it hard to focus. Choosing a path when the forest is enormous can paralyse you. Maybe that is why — and because of everything I write about in this blog — I decided to do a bootcamp and set a clear direction inside all that noise.

It was hard. Especially when my classmates could have been my children (well… not quite, but almost 😅). They were 19, 20 years old… the oldest was 33. Different lives, different paths, different responsibilities. Different everything, basically.

And staying focused when the forest is so big and so overwhelming… is hard.

Staying focused when everything around you is noise.

You know you should only compare yourself with yourself. But sometimes that is hard. Really hard.

It took me 10 years to make the decision to change direction. Ten years. A lifetime.

Out of fear of failing. Out of fear of starting from scratch. Out of feeling old for a startup (yes, yes… at 24 I already felt old).

I am quite hard on myself. And at the same time I congratulate myself for having had the courage to do it in the most difficult setting possible: three small children, extremely dependent and demanding; in another country; and ten years older.

Clearly I like the hard road.

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I am only half hard on myself, because ten years ago this whole code thing had not even crossed my mind. I already knew something was not right, but it took me years of fighting with myself to work it out.

This journey started in my head, pregnant with my third child. And I managed to make it real two years later.

This road is only just beginning. I have a lot to learn, a lot of experience to gain.

But for the first time in my working life I can say that I like what I do. That I enjoy working at this. And that I am deeply happy to have made it.

And even though today I can say I did it — that I finished, that I learned, that I survived the bootcamp and my own fears — the truth is that this is not an ending.

It is the real beginning.

Because studying was the foundation. What comes now is the leap: looking for work, facing interviews, getting silence, maybe rejections, carrying on training, carrying on doubting, carrying on growing.

This blog was born as a way of organising my head. And it is going to carry on being that.

I am going to document every step of this new stage: the job hunt, the interviews, the “nos”, the “almosts”, the learnings, the strategies, the mistakes and — hopefully — the moment that first “yes” arrives.

If I have learned anything in these years it is that fear does not disappear. You walk with it.

And this time, the desire weighs more.

So yes.

Finishing your studies is, in fact, the real beginning.

And I am only just starting.