RWDevCon Inspiration Talk – Starting Over by Ellen Shapiro

My Third Career: iOS Engineer

This led to my third career as an actual nerd. I decided to be a professional nerd because I had always been good at tech stuff, at least in comparison to the rest of the entertainment business.

When I first started at Ellen in 2003, I was the only person who knew how to hook up a Mac to a network printer. As I moved from show to show, people started to figure out that I was often a reasonable substitute for calling IT.

Attribution: flickr.com

Attribution: flickr.com

I was good enough at IT stuff that I actually put together a decent little side business fixing computers and networking issues for writers and producers and other sorts of people who had a lot more money than time.

I knew I can easily go into IT professionally, but I wanted something more challenging. I realized I didn’t want to be fixing other people’s mistakes. I wanted to be making my own mistakes, damn it.

I was so fascinated by smartphones and their inherent potential that I knew, I just knew I had to learn how they worked.

I found a program through UCLA extension that quickly taught me the basics of object oriented programming and showed me how to make very rudimentary iPhone and Android apps. That confirmed to me, this is what I want to do.

I kept building stuff.

I made three iOS apps and two Android apps on my own and it was hard, especially back in the dark ages of 2010 an 2011. I found raywenderlich.com and I inhaled tutorials from this site like air.

I finally got a job and I moved back to Chicago and I kept learning. I kept learning and I kept learning and I worked every spare second I had to keep getting better and I continue to do that every single day.

Four years after I first learned how to program, I am here speaking about how to do it and I am building tools and writing tutorials to make it easier for other people to learn. :]

Now that you have heard what is essentially my entire life story, I want to take some of the lessons that I learned and make them actionable for you. I want to share the five most important things I learned from starting over, and over.

Lesson 1: What You Are Passionate About Can Change

The first lesson is: The thing that you are passionate about can change and that is okay.

You always hear all sorts of your advice about following passion and this is really, really easy if the thing that you are passionate about is easy to get into and pays a zillion dollars.

It’s a lot harder if the thing that you’re passionate about is difficult or it puts a mental or financial strain on you or your family or if you’re working against any kind of entrenched system that tells you that for whatever reason, what you’re doing is not good enough.

The fact of the matter is the thing that you are passionate about at 10, the thing that you’re passionate about 22, the thing that you’re passionate about at 40 and the thing that you’re passionate about at 65 can all be very, very different.

If you’re doing something because you’re passionate, not just because you want to pick up a paycheck, you have to constantly challenge that passion. Life is short and the time that we have to make an impact can be even shorter if you need good health to do it.

You have to ask yourself the hard question, “Is this still what I want to do with my life?”

Failing to ask that question and ask it regularly can lead to years of dissatisfaction because you are doing what you dreamed of doing, but you don’t realize that the dream belong to a different version of you.

The answer to, “Is this still what I want to be doing with my life,” can remain yes for a really long time. Simply asking that question is a really helpful way to push yourself to work on the things that you’re most passionate about and really get the most out of your life.

But you also have to be okay with the answer to that question being no. You have to be willing to use that response as a jumping off point to figure out, “Well, what do I want to do with my life?”

Lesson 2: Making Lemonade Out Of Lemons

When you get to the point that you realized no, you’re not doing what you want to be doing with your life, you can feel like life handed you a lemon. This is when: Making lemonade out of lemons is a necessity.

In my case, this actually happened both literally and figuratively.

In the literal case, this is a lemon.

Despite its size being what it is, it is definitely a lemon. It almost hit me in the head when I was walking home from the gym one day.

Any time you have a set back it can be very, very frustrating. It’s like almost getting hit in the head with a giant lemon.

You have to be able to look at a set back and say, “Well, that sucked but it happened and I can’t change that. How can I move forward from here?”

You could spend all your time:

• Looking at the lemon that almost hit you
• Lamenting how heavy or how sour it is
• Thinking about how much better it would be if it was an orange

If you do this, you’re not able to look at the opportunities that the lemon itself provides.

Instead you could say, “Okay, I have this gigantic lemon. What on earth am I going to do with this?”

Sometimes you can actually wind up with a lot of delicious lemonade.

In the literal case, one giant lemon, it turns out, can make more than half a gallon of lemonade.

In the figurative case, I’d actually originally intended to go back to school and get my master’s in computer science, but I quickly realized when I went to do this that I was not academically qualified. To get academically qualified was going to take years if it could be done at all.

I was crushed for a while after I found this out. Then I realized that moping was going to do me about as much good as staring at a lemon wishing it were lemonade. I had to regroup.

I did some research and I found a more professionally targeted UCLA extension program and I realized I have this lemon of not being able to get a master’s in computer science, but I have this other opportunity that could get me to be a working software engineer much faster. The figurative lemonade has really been my entire iOS career.