> That year, I lost about thirty pounds due not having enough money for food. It was in this context that the lab’s principal investigator told me that his funding for my position was running out. Desperate for work, I applied for a job as a web producer and decided to learn to code. My thinking was that it was a stepping stone towards any sort of scientific career, and it would be possible without more formal education or debt. In hindsight, this was the right move, but at the time, it felt like the only move.<p>This reminded me of the summer when I accidentally landed my first programming gig at my friend's startup as a part-time web developer during university. I was running out of money for food as my research assistant role was unpaid and I asked around for some odd jobs in the city. As a non-CS major, all I had was data analysis skills in Python but my friend thought I was was good enough to help him out with his SaaS startup, and I ended up learning a lot on software engineering principles on that job.