Six Months to My First Engineering Job

I dropped out of high school. Six months after I started learning to code, I got hired as a software engineer at 19 — no degree, no bootcamp, no internship, and no AI to explain why my code was broken.

But coding is not where the story starts.

Before code

Hey, I'm Miraya. When I was 13 my family moved from Sweden to Germany, which meant being introverted, dyslexic, and suddenly expected to learn everything in a new language. School and I were already not getting along, and moving countries did not improve the relationship.

What I had instead was drawing, Lego and anime. I have always liked creating things.

My mum trained as a nurse, but the language requirements meant she could not work as one in Germany, so she moved into the beauty industry and learned lash extensions. Out of her three children, guess who got recruited.

Me.

That is how I became a lash technician at 13 — school during the day, clients after school. A completely normal teenage schedule, obviously.

Me as a teenager, masked and leaning over a client mid-lash-set in my mum's studio, pink floral backdrop behind us. — My mum's studio — the one she built after nursing didn't transfer. Earphones in, one lash at a time.

Later my drawing turned into tattooing. It started as something fun, then people began paying me for it, and eventually I had a good client base and was earning decent money.

Then COVID happened

Touching people stopped being allowed, which is inconvenient when both of your jobs involve touching people. No clients meant no income.

In my family, money was never only one person's problem. Very typical immigrant-family logic: if you can help, you help. So sitting around waiting for it to pass was not really an option, and I needed a new plan.

Why I started

My brother is one year older than me and had also dropped out of high school. Apparently that was becoming a family tradition. But he had taught himself to code and become a software engineer, and watching him do it was the first time I understood there was another way in.

So I started learning frontend. I chose it because I loved visuals and wanted to bring my own ideas to life, and then JavaScript arrived and humbled me immediately. I honestly hated it at the start.

There was no ChatGPT or AI assistant to explain an error message to me. It was me, tutorials, documentation, and far too many browser tabs.

What the six months looked like

I cut out social media and pointed everything at one goal, building every day, usually for 10 or 11 hours. Even during meals I had a tutorial running or something to read, because apparently lunch was not allowed to just be lunch.

Me at a desk in front of a BenQ monitor with a browser and devtools open, giving a thumbs up to the camera. A whiteboard with a handwritten list is on the wall behind. — Somewhere in the six months. The whiteboard is a teenage to-do list in Swedish — körkort, praktik i Dec., träna. The internship never happened. The job did.

Was that balanced? Absolutely not. Am I telling you to do the same? No. It is simply what my six months looked like.

At the end of them, at 19, I landed my first software engineering job as a frontend developer at one of Germany's largest tech companies.