Hi, I'm Rachel.

Background

My background was originally in psychology. I was mostly interested in statistics and research, and I did my honours thesis on how the visual system responds to fractal images.

For the last three years, I've worked as the Operations Manager of an eLearning startup. My role involved a lot of talking to users and translating their needs into tickets for the programmers. Then I got interested in programming myself, so I did a few online courses and started researching the career. Finally, I took the plunge to quit my job and enrol in Dev Academy!

Purpose

My main goal is to get a job as a full-stack developer.

My key values are curiosity and adaptability, which you can read about more in this core post.

A lot of my values I got from my parents, and there's a couple of proverbs from them that sum up how I live my life. My dad always says:

"Be a rat in a maze".

This is an challenge to keep trying different things, even though that might involve scrabbling around and doubling-back sometimes. It's a way of saying "be flexible, determined and efficient in pursuit of your goals".

My mum also has a favourite proverb:

"Life is not a quiet river".

This means to accept that you can't control everything in life. Sometimes a set of rapids come out of nowhere, and all you can do is adapt — struggling against the current only tires you out. It also means to enjoy the smooth sailing when you can!

Between these two worldviews, I think it's a pretty solid ideal; to stay oriented towards my goals without trying to control the uncontrollable.

There are worse ways to enjoy life