🔧 Lab 19 — Draw Your Own Map

Goal: turn the lesson into a personal, written plan: your transferable skills, your target first role, your honest 6-month schedule, a public mini-portfolio page, and your first community.

You’ll need: paper or a notes app, a web browser, your free GitHub account from Module 08, and about 90 minutes (Part 5 then runs quietly for a week). No installation.

Five parts. Do 1–3 in one sitting if you can — they build on each other. Parts 4 and 5 can happen another day.

Part 1 — Write your “tech origin story” paragraph (20 minutes)

Every career-changer needs one paragraph that answers “so why tech, and why you?” — you’ll use it in applications, interviews, and community introductions. The raw material is skills you already own.

Step 1: Go through this checklist and write down every line that applies to you — be generous with yourself:

If you’ve done this… …you already have this tech-relevant skill
Teaching, training, parenting Explaining hard things → documentation, support, product
Retail, hospitality, care work Reading frustrated humans → UX, support, customer success
Accounting, bookkeeping, admin Precision with numbers and rules → data analysis, QA
Logistics, kitchens, events Coordinating chaos on a deadline → project coordination, ops
Sales, fundraising Persuading without authority → product management (Module 18!)
Trades, repair, farming Diagnosing systems by symptoms → debugging mindset, QA, support
Nursing, law, any regulated field Domain expertise + working carefully under rules → priceless in that industry’s software
Writing anything for work Clear writing → the rarest engineering-adjacent skill (the lesson said so)

Step 2: Now write one paragraph (4–6 sentences) in this shape:

I spent [N years] as a [role], where I got good at [transferable skill 1] and [transferable skill 2]. I got curious about how software really works, so I completed a full software engineering foundations course — I can [pick real things: read and write basic Python, use Git and GitHub, explain how the web works]. I’m aiming for [target role — Part 2 will sharpen this], where my background in [domain] is an advantage because [one honest sentence].

✅ What you should have: a paragraph you could read aloud to a stranger without wincing. Read it aloud now — actually aloud. Edit whatever made you wince.

Part 2 — Pick a target first role with the decision tree (15 minutes)

Work through this tree with a pen. Answer with your gut; you can change your mind later — a chosen direction you adjust beats an unchosen one you circle forever.

START: Did you enjoy the coding modules (04, 05) enough
to want MORE of that feeling most days?
│
├── YES → Do you prefer building things people SEE,
│         or the machinery behind them? (Module 10)
│         ├── Things people see  → target: FRONTEND developer
│         │                        (path: HTML/CSS/JavaScript — The Odin Project)
│         ├── The machinery      → target: BACKEND developer
│         │                        (path: more Python — freeCodeCamp)
│         └── Honestly both/unsure → target: FULL-STACK, start frontend
│                                    (you'll specialize later; almost everyone does)
│
└── NO → That's a real answer, not a failure. Which sounds most
         like a good Tuesday?
         ├── "I found a weird case nobody thought of"     → QA / TESTING
         ├── "I helped a stuck person and cracked their
         │    puzzle"                                     → SUPPORT ENGINEERING
         ├── "I made a confusing thing clear in writing"  → TECHNICAL WRITING
         ├── "I found the story hiding in a spreadsheet"  → DATA ANALYSIS
         │                                                  (Excel → SQL, Module 12)
         ├── "I decided what mattered most and got
         │    everyone aligned"                           → PRODUCT / COORDINATION
         └── "I sketched a better version of a bad
              screen"                                     → DESIGN (UX)

Write down: your target role, and one sentence on why it fits your Part 1 paragraph.

⚠️ Watch out: this is a first target, not a tattoo. In tech, people move between these roles constantly — support engineers become developers, QA becomes product, analysts become data engineers. Every box above is a door, and the building is connected on the inside.

✅ What you should have: one role written at the top of a fresh page. Feel free to write “(for now)” next to it. That’s honest and correct.

Part 3 — Draw your 6-month learning plan (20 minutes)

Copy this template and fill it in. The rules: be honest about hours (the plan that survives is the one that fits your real life), one project, one community.

MY 6-MONTH PLAN — started [date], target role: [from Part 2]

HONEST WEEKLY BUDGET
  Hours/week I can really sustain (after work, family, rest): ____
  (Be honest. 6 real hours beat 20 imaginary ones.)
  My learning slots: e.g. "Tue + Thu 8-9:30pm, Sat morning 2h"

MONTHS 1-2 — FINISH & FOUNDATION
  [ ] Finish this course's capstone (pick a track this week)
  [ ] Start ONE canon resource matched to my role:
      coding → The Odin Project or freeCodeCamp
      data   → freeCodeCamp's data-analysis track (SQL!)
      other  → the "first step" from the lesson's role table

MONTHS 3-4 — THE LOOP, PROJECT #2
  [ ] Build one small project SLIGHTLY too hard for me
      Idea: ____________________ (steal from capstone track C's list)
  [ ] Get stuck at least once and get unstuck without quitting
  [ ] Put it on GitHub with a plain-English README

MONTHS 5-6 — GO PUBLIC
  [ ] Project #3, OR make #1-2 genuinely good
  [ ] GitHub profile page live (Part 4)
  [ ] Ask one person in my community to look at my portfolio
  [ ] Rewrite my origin story paragraph with what's now true

MY ONE COMMUNITY (Part 5): ____________________
THE RULE I WILL NOT BREAK: rest weeks are allowed;
  quitting quietly is not. If I miss 2 weeks, I restart
  small (1 hour) instead of "catching up" heroically.

✅ What you should have: a filled-in, dated plan. Now put it where you’ll see it — photo on your phone, page on the fridge. Plans in drawers don’t work; plans in eyelines do.

Part 4 — Set up your GitHub profile README (20 minutes)

Time to hang a sign on your gallery. GitHub has a semi-hidden feature: create a repository named exactly the same as your username, and its README appears at the top of your profile page — a free mini-portfolio.

Steps:

  1. Sign in to GitHub and click the + (top right) → New repository — the same moves as the Module 08 lab.
  2. Name the repository exactly your username. If your username is janedoe, the repository must be janedoe. GitHub will show a message confirming you’ve found the special repository — that’s your cue you spelled it right.
  3. Make it Public, tick Add a README file, and create.
  4. Click the pencil icon on the README and replace the contents with something like this (edit every line to be true):
# Hi, I'm Jane 👋

Former [your field] learning software engineering.
Completed a full foundations course (computers, Python,
Git, databases, the cloud) and now building in public.

## What I'm building
- 🏗️ My capstone: [one line] — link coming soon
- 🌱 Currently learning: [e.g. more Python via freeCodeCamp]

## Background
[2-3 lines of your Part 1 origin story — the transferable-skills part.]
  1. Scroll down and commit the change (you know what that word means now — that’s Module 08 working).
  2. Visit github.com/yourusername and admire.

✅ What you should see: your profile page now opens with your own words instead of emptiness. When you finish the capstone, come back and turn “link coming soon” into a real link. That single edit will feel wonderful.

Part 5 — Find one community and lurk for a week (10 minutes now, then passive)

The lesson was blunt: loneliness, not difficulty, is why self-taught journeys stall. Time to pick your one community.

Steps:

  1. Spend ten minutes looking at two candidates:
    • Local: search meetup.com for your city + “coding”, “tech”, or your target role. No city hits? Widen to the nearest big town — many groups meet online too.
    • Online: visit the freeCodeCamp forum — free, famously kind to beginners, active around the clock.
  2. Pick one. Write it into your Part 3 plan.
  3. Join/register, then lurk for one week — read daily for a few minutes, post nothing yet. You’re learning the room’s tone: how people ask questions, what gets warm answers, who the regulars are. (Lurking first is good manners everywhere on the internet.)
  4. After the week, post one small thing. The lowest-stakes opener works fine: introduce yourself in the introductions thread using — you guessed it — your Part 1 paragraph.

✅ What you should have (in a week): a community where you recognize the tone and have said one small hello. That thread is where you’ll ask your first real stuck-question during the capstone — and now it won’t be a room of strangers.

🎉 Done!

Look at what exists now that didn’t this morning: an origin story, a chosen direction, a dated plan, a public portfolio page, and a community. That’s not “thinking about getting into tech.” That’s a person on a path. Next stop: the capstone.