This article was written about non-traditional paths into Ruby on Rails development. It was written for the Scholars and Guides program of RailsConf 2025 in Philadelphia.


My backstory

I’ve always admired the creativity and technical skill of the developers I’ve encountered through my love for physics, science fiction, and games. This admiration deepened when I joined a remote-first tech startup and began meeting talented developers worldwide on my travels. Last year, driven by curiosity and the practical benefit of improving the SaaS product I work with daily, I decided to dive into learning Ruby on Rails.

Seeking a community that aligned with my journey, I joined WNB.rb, an incredibly supportive community for women and nonbinary Rubyists. Through WNB.rb, I discovered Ruby Central’s Scholars and Guides program. Participating in this initiative not only strengthened my coding foundations but also connected me deeply with the Ruby community, inspiring me to take on more projects and further my development skills.


On Scholars and Guides

The Scholars and Guides Program is a mentorship program for aspiring Rubyists interested in learning more about the Ruby programming language, expanding their professional toolkits, and having help navigating the Ruby Central conferences, RubyConf, and RailsConf. As part of the program we participated in a project that built on our skills as developers. The program is friendly to all skill levels.

For my own project, I simulated a working environment with my project guide Michelle Yuen, who assigned issues in the ChicagoRuby repository to me. It was invaluable for learning version control, deployment workflows, and collaboration, mimicking real-world professional development processes in a low-stakes environment.

Through that, I utilised the same markdown-based static site generation workflows to create this here site. When I arrived at the conference I asked Rails community members questions that I needed answers to, which I use throughout this post. I also asked Ruby Central to record me talking about the experience. How did my mini-project come to be four mini-mini-projects, you ask? Because that’s how my mind works, and it was more fun that way.


First software conferences

The program is specifically designed so that people with less experience in software can easily access advice regarding learning, career development, and the conference. My guide Michelle was therefore my first point of contact. I also reached out to Felipe Vogel for advice to first-time conference goers, who said:

“One bit of networking advice I can give is this: at times you might feel hesitant to talk to more experienced people because it feels like you’re wasting their time, or you don’t have anything to offer them in exchange for their knowledge and useful connections. But speaking for myself and probably for a lot of people who are further down the road, a lot of these people enjoy helping you. Or if you have to think about it in a transactional way: you get their knowledge and connections, and they get the good feeling of helping someone make the same journey that they made years ago. And maybe an important part of their identity is to be a mentor and they get to be more of that by helping you out. The point is, you shouldn’t feel like a bother by talking to the veterans. A lot of them are there exactly to meet people like you, not only to talk with old friends.”

How true this ended up being! Throughout the conference, I had the opportunity to engage with leading community members, keynote speakers, and CEOs of well-known companies, all of whom were consistently generous, approachable, and supportive. I was told repeatedly that RubyConf and RailsConf are among the most welcoming conferences in the tech world, and my experience reflected that.

Ahead of the conference, my mentor and first Ruby Friend encouraged me to set aside impostor syndrome, enjoy the experience, and not shy away from positioning myself as a strong candidate for a traineeship. Their advice was simple: companies still need junior developers they can train into future seniors, and I already bring valuable experience from working in SaaS. By focusing on the skills I do have rather than the ones I don’t yet I could approach conversation with more confidence. This mindset shift made the difference when in conversation with other attendees.


The winding road to code

I wanted to approach RailsConf as a way to learn about nontypical routes into software development and to solidify my learning direction. As it turns out, about a third of people I met had a self-made story of transitioning from one career to a Rails engineer job, completely invalidating my perception of career transitions being nontypical. Here are those stories as a helpful reminder of creativity, grit, and perseverance.

1: Career gaps

A favourite code-genesis story from the conference came from David Black, the founder behind Ruby Central. He wrote his first programme in 1972 as a teenager, but drifted away soon after. In 1987 he picked up programming again as a hobby, alongside his academic career in media history. Discovering Ruby in 2001 reignited his passion, eventually inspiring him (at age 46) to leave his tenured professorship and pursue coding professionally. Thirty years ain’t nothing.

2: Rejection

Catherine Meyers was one of the two professional opera-singers-turned-software-engineers I met at RailsConf. Her initial bootcamp rejection only strengthened her resolve, pushing her to double down on learning to code. The second time she applied, she was accepted to the bootcamp, excelled in her career and now works as an engineer at Apple.

3: Diversity of interests

I resonated most with Alex Domin of Lucet, whose academic career began in pre-med training, a mid-career focused in music store management and gigging due to his passion for guitar, and a leap of faith fuelled by knowing he could achieve a better standard of living with a career in software. Alex credits his rigorous traineeship, where he regularly had to pinpoint errors (often just a single faulty line of code) in sets of three or four related files spanning thousands of lines, as essential to his growth.

4: Impostor syndrome

Mario Saraiva began his professional life as a trader in the financial industry, then owned a hostel and a hotel before starting to learn how to code in his thirties. His advice: stay in competition with yourself. To him the path to development is just about being consistent and putting in the time. The path is gradual and impostor syndrome is common, but the day you finally “wake up as a software engineer” will come as long as you put the work in. Mario said his turning point in learning was getting a junior position in a larger company.

5: Previous experience

Carlos Figueiredo started his career in tech with computer assembly, passing through customer service, infrastructure and database administration; before switching into development. On each switch, the previous experience was useful somehow, even if only to broaden his perspective approaching customer problems.

“Regardless of your starting point, your previous experience is useful somewhere. In our area, there is always a project that values someone with experience in different areas, even if only to contribute with the understanding of the customer’s needs.”


Perspectives from community leaders

Learnings from a panel between Rails community leaders, who shared their varied journeys into software development. The paths were all unique, but the core takeaways felt universal and highly encouraging:

  • You don’t need to understand everything right away: One panelist admitted she understood maybe 2% of every Rails talk she attended early on, but that tiny 2% was enough to change her life
  • Accidental opportunities can shape your path: Several panelists stumbled into key opportunities (from spontaneously presenting a side project at a local meetup, to casually entering a coding competition). These small moments turned into career-defining experiences
  • You don’t need to be technical from the start: One founder openly shared feeling held back by her lack of technical experience. A free bootcamp opportunity (that happened to teach Rails) became her entry into tech, showing you don’t have to be born coding to succeed
  • Fear shouldn’t stop you: One panelist moved from photography into tech purely for financial reasons, then forced herself past a fear of public speaking to give her first technical talk. Facing discomfort directly paved her path into the Rails core team
  • Exposure to influential ideas matters: Another panelist described joining a startup where he was handed a stack of influential programming books. Encountering these new perspectives, particularly at a well-timed conference, opened his eyes to new possibilities, transforming how he thought about building software forever

“Everything you’ve ever wanted lies on the other side of fear”

Of all said at the conference, that sentence left the most impact. It captured exactly why I attended RailsConf: to push past hesitation and embrace new paths in tech. While the future of software development might feel uncertain, the stories I heard reassured me that tech has always been about adaptability, creativity, and continuous learning. The best way forward is simply to embrace the journey and step into opportunities as they arise. It’s an exciting time to be entering this space.


My next steps

Having a busy and fulfilling contract in the SaaS I work at presently means I’ll keep honing soft‑skills for tech. I’ll continue to actively contribute to open source (contributing data to rubyevents.org is next), continue a personal kickboxing gym catalogue project, and take on my first paid freelance project.

Above all through RailsConf I confirmed that across all tech disciplines, supporting communities is fun. From maintaining local meetup group sites to contributing data to even larger open source projects, my own work will invariably continue to revolve around this.

Equipped with a love for people and technology, an epic support network, and several ways to contribute to existing code bases, I begin my story around now. Watch this space.


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