Irene D. Martinez

• What does coding mean to me?

  Coding brings to life a childlike part of me who was creative, curious, and determined to express herself virtually when she didn’t have the freedom before to do so in real life. She loves being stubborn in figuring out how I can make the computer act in the way that I want.

• Why did I quit my last job?
  The pandemic was a crucial time for all of us. While some of the workforce began to WFH, as a pharmacist & pharmacy manager for Walgreens I never stopped working. When the COVID-19 vaccines were approved at the end of 2020, I spent the next 5 months feeling like I was saving the world. But at the same time, I was in survival mode – skipping my lunch breaks, working up to 16h a day to make a dent in the workload.... There were simply too many people relying on me; even if I had to work alone, I showed up anyway. I asked corporate for more hands on deck or a modified schedule, but I didn't stop or slow down when aid wasn't given to me.... Then in March 2021, when I was scheduled to work 11 days in a row, I finally had a panic attack at work on the 9th day. I told myself that I would wait for it to happen again before I would consider leaving my job, but in the months following, I began making mistakes in the prescriptions I was checking. I had to come to terms with the fact that I was here to help people, but because I was burned out & not mentally well, my next mistake could hurt someone. I resigned 2 months later, in June 2021.
• But why did I leave pharmacy all together?
  Turning 29 after my resignation was a true reckoning for me. Not only was I doing therapy to help me understand my exhaustion & anxiety, but I was coming to terms with the fact that I had always lived my entire life for others, and it would kill me if I continued. I resolved that my first step to learning how to assert boundaries would be never putting myself in that kind of all-sacrificing position again. Unfortunately, this meant that I didn't see a future for myself in the U.S. healthcare system, especially because my sole motivation in pharmacy had been talking and teaching patients.
• So how did I find software engineering?
  It has been an emotional, meaningful journey to get here. My therapist asked me to think of what came naturally to me as a child (before I had internalized an identity), and what came to mind was writing & fiddling with computers. Before high school, I was obsessed with getting the right fonts and colors for the song lyrics on my Myspace page. I would procrastinate on my pre-pharmacy studies for hours just because my Tumblr theme didn't look exactly how I wanted it. When my 2011 Macbook Pro started failing during pharmacy school, I replaced the hard drive with an SSD. (This ultimately ended up being the computer I completed bootcamp with!) Unfortunately, no one at that time ever told me that computers or technology could be a career. Fortunately, the pandemic had revealed SWE as a booming field, and I had many SWE friends who encouraged me that I could do this. In April 2022, I decided to sit in for App Academy's pre-bootcamp (for ground zero learners), knowing I could leave any day in the first week.... But I never did. I enrolled in their in-person cohort a month later and graduated the day after my 30th birthday in September 2022.
• How am I doing now?
  Doing well! With the market as bad as it has been since I graduated, I decided to bide my time as I recovered from the intensity of bootcamp. Nowadays, I code upwards of 6-8 hours a day at home, sometimes group projects and sometimes solo projects, while still taking time for self-reflection and self-care. I find myself able to handle much more stress than I did before bootcamp, and I'm excited to start working again in 2024. I am mostly targeting companies whose mission is to have a positive social impact. I have a pipe dream of working for a company who creates technology that will help healthcare providers take better care of their patients & daily workload (ask me in an interview how technology impacted my work as a frontline worker during the pandemic 🫠) but I am open to any opportunity that will help me grow as a developer~

It's been a journey of immense change, persistence, and internal shifting, and it will only be a continued process and infinite mindset from here.

Many of these are still under development. Please feel free to click around and explore; let me know what you think!