I'm a software engineer, and the part of tech I care about most is the people side of it. Communities, meetups, hackathons, the random event where you end up talking to a stranger about their side project for an hour. I organize some of those and show up to a lot more.
Tech came late. I tried a lot of things first: handball, which I played professionally for a while, then martial arts. None of it stuck the way code did. That happened during COVID, alone at home with a laptop and too much time, and somewhere in there programming stopped being a subject I was studying and became the thing I wanted to do.
At university I got lucky. There was a local community of students who were already building things, and they let me in before I felt ready. That group pushed me harder than any class did. It's where I gave my first talk and figured out I liked helping other people get into this as much as doing it myself.
So now I'm a software engineer, officially. I don't love the title. It's accurate, but it leaves out most of what I do and want to do, and I'm still working out which way to point so the wind does some of the work.