Welcome to the Code to be podcast. We talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I'm your host to Ron, and today we're talking about going from being a homeless single mom to being a software engineer with Brittany Ball documentation engineer at Meta. While I was learning and developing my skills,

I was also bringing in other people who had similar interests

and didn't have access to certain things.

I was bringing them in.

We were studying together, and this created a pipeline

for those individuals in the community that didn't come from a university

or didn't come from this coding boot camp.

Burding talks about the Europe program and her coding journey after this.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

I'm very excited.

So you say that you got into tech because of survival.

What does that mean?

At that time, I wasn't really looking for a career is more so like being homeless and having to find a career for my child.

I was pregnant and I was in this shelter for women and children.

And once I had the baby, they told me that I had to either enroll into college courses or get a job or something. And, you know, at this time,

like college wasn't for me because I had to take care of a baby by myself. And so, like,

I didn't have the time to, like, go to college. And then, like, with the shelter I stayed in,

they had curfew. So I couldn't work a night job.

And so I had to choose something that, like, would benefit my situation.

And that's when I found a program called Year Up, which actually gave me a stipend

while learning how to actually build computers.

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