Once homeless and a school dropout my work today focuses on improving the lives of vulnerable groups, through technical and vocational education and training I’m a big believer that anyone can learn anything with time and determination. I don’t hold any time of degree beyond my cybersecurity and developer certificates that i obtained; my interest and push into tech sparked after several failed attempts at applying for jobs when i was about 19, when i kept getting rejected due to the fact i held no degree and the only job i was ever accepted to was cleaning houses and washing dishes in restaurants, now am not saying there is anything working with those jobs but when you are young and full of ambition and desire to build a better life especially after life served you with some lemons, this crushed my spirit because it was proof that the world saw me as a non educated black woman and I was never going to amount to anything.
Finding myself working in tech was something I wouldn’t have predicted, I was working as an administrative assistant at ULB(University Libre Bruxelles) and one day my boss at that time came up to me and asked me to head into the IT department because she wanted me to learn how to code because the webmaster was heading to holiday, and she wanted me to update the website, now my first instinct when I heard IT was to think I was not capable of learning it and I would already see myself failing before actually failing, so I refused to give her some sort of excuse of being busy, I managed to get away with it for 2 weeks then she put her foot down and told to head over to the department or I was fired and that got my ass running across the campus to learn how to code.
That day something happened that i can only describe it as a lightbulb moment, where the webmaster was explaining HTML, CSS, and JavaScript basic and i actually got it, now for someone who spends a small part of her life thinking she was dumb this was a huge moment, till this day i can remember the feeling of me realizing that I found something i can actually be good, my boss at that time did something so life-changing I don’t think she even realized it.
So here we are 5 years later I coded my way into cybersecurity which has led me to work for my dream job at Microsoft as a Cloud Endpoint Technical Specialist, a large reason for me telling you this story is my boss pushed me into this path, and she did it without knowing how much that one single decision would change my life, and even though it took a lot of work to get the right information since back then coding boot-camps weren’t such a thing, but I did it through networking, LOTS of trial and error, hard work and just a bit of sprinkle of luck and my destiny was completely changed forever.
About Aime Digital
Apart from my love for my coffee, my two kids, and tech, my biggest joy is seeing others succeed. I like to think of myself as an unconventional self-taught guru and I believe in sharing my experience and failures so that you can use them to forge your own path, and It’s why I actually started blogging, training, and grabbing coffee with strangers across the globe.
Simply put I started Aime Digital to bring you value, be your to go person and see you use the many digital tools at hands!
Aimé Digital is more than a blog: it’s a place to find advice and support on using technology to change your destiny.
So through the articles i share on this blog, I hope I’ve helped you use tech to your advantage, or through my thoughts and feeling i managed to put a smile on your face.
Be kind to someone today; I dare you!