The episode I’m commenting on is titled, “#163 Layla Porter was led to coding by her horse riding and personal coaching business”.

I have a partner who is into horseback riding and so I selected this episode because I thought I could potentially develop something that helps her.

In the podcast episode I listened to, we follow the software developer, Layla Porter. Layla first started learning programming with ActionScript and HTML when she was young. Most of Layla’s early learning was self-taught and for personal entertainment.

Layla starts her story by talking about the opportunity she received as an adult to ride horses full time. This was something Layla was excited about because she grew up riding horses her whole life.

While riding horses full time, she had friends at her work, who knew how to code and would teach her object oriented programming, Objective C, and Model View ViewModel.

Eventually, Layla decided to take a break from horseback riding and became a speciality personal trainer for horseback riders. She started her own gym called, “The Rider’s Gym” and made her own website to set up her business. At first, she had a pretty successful gym for several years coaching both professional and amateur horseback riders.

After some time though, her business started to become less profitable and she started reading books and teaching herself the skills needed for a career switch to become a developer.

Layla applied to many jobs and eventually landed an entry level coding position. She managed to work her way up to a senior engineer after some additional job switches, and by dedicating herself to learning as much as she can in the field.

Currently, Layla still works in software development and she is an advocate for people from all backgrounds becoming developers if they are willing to put in the time and effort to learn it.

While my partner is not likely to start up her own fitness/horseback riding business soon, one of the most interesting things about this episode for me is how informal Layla’s learning experience was and yet she managed to become a successful developer.

As I continue in my own personal journey in software development, I’ve learned that though a formal education is invaluable, life experiences and projects that require me to develop/code are also critical.

Lastly, in this podcast episode, Layla referenced a couple of things that pertained to our course topics. She mentions how using a .Net framework was crucial for her creating her business website, she discusses how her friends taught her the principles of object oriented programming, and discusses how she focused on the front end of her website to make sure it was user friendly, while her partner worked on the backend to make sure her customers’ information was properly stored and managed.

Episode link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7nG94EwjIH7UQPSc6ZD8H6

From the blog Sensinci's Blog by Sensinci's Blog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.