Hello, this is me. My name is Norberto Santiago, I used to do a podcast with some of my friends called Movie Slam. We did like 11 or 12 episodes and is about movies rated with wrestling moves. If the movie was boring, it would be rated as a sleephold, if it was great, it was a superkick. You got the idea. Other than cohosting a podcast and hanguing out, I write a movie blog called The Small Reviews and I used to host movie night parties at one of my favorite places in town. Looks like a happy person’s life, some great talented friends, writing about movies and hosting parties and last but not least, starting a relationship with a sweet, beautiful woman.
Then, what happened? Why did I wanted to change my life? Why you left everything in Puerto Rico and moved to below zero weather in Alaska? The answer is simple, I wasn’t happy. Work made me miserable, I was downgraded from a talented Business Inteligence analyst with a bright future to a repetitive task that led me nowhere in my career. I came from having daily and weekly troubleshooting adventures to be sentenced to a boring task. The story is way too long and I won’t reveal where I was working. But it resumes to people just saying; “You can’t do it.”, “You don’t have the education.” or “You’re already good at this, keep working on that.”
Since I was a kid in the 80’s, I was fascinated with the world of computers and technologies. Obssessed with video games and sci-fi movies, I knew since I was that young I wanted my life to be revolved around technology and it was to some extent if we consider playing Nintendo and watching the movie Tron millions of times to be revolving around technology.
When the time for college came I enrolled in Computer Science at Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico. But there was a problem, I was terrible at math, I was working in a supermarket until midnight just to wake up at 6:00 am and (worst of all) I was a insecure. People would start telling me that I can’t make it, even in my own family. Needless to say, I gave up Computer Science for a Network Administration degree.
Years will go by, until we get to those glorious days as a Business Intelligence consultant, I would work different shifts monitoring a system and troubleshooting, delighting the customer with my troubleshooting skills and my fully understanding of that system. With that responsability, I would start to understand SQL and even change some codes here and there. Simple stuff, but full of potential. That’s when I knew coding was my thing and I needed those trainings and those opportunities. Sadly, those never came and I had no idea about Coding Bootcamps.
Giving up and concentrating my life with my other passion, movies and pop culture, I would start to know myself. 2019 wasn’t just a year of getting over the whole Hurricane Maria aftermath, it was also of enjoying life to the fullest and leaving all my anxieties and insecurities behind. Along all the things that were happening, I was dating the most beautiful flaca in the whole world. The start of my new chapter would start when she found a job in Alaska and I decided to hop on the plane with her and her two kids. Working part time in the same place and looking for new opportunities, discovered Career Karma. There I knew, there’s more people like me. More people looking for their life opportunity to change their life and become a coder. It was an epiphany, perhaps I’m born to be a Software Engineer and life was waiting to let me live my dream after all these events.
To come back to the questions. Why a coding? Cause I want to contribute to the technologies people who love technology as much as me enjoy. Why in my late thirties? Cause that’s been life, compelling enough to write about it in blogs. And if everything happened to inspire others, then it was worth taking all those hits.