For 10 years, the restaurant industry was my world. I worked my way up from hostessing to bartending to managing, bouncing between casual spots and fine dining. I loved the pace, the people, and the problem-solving that came with keeping a restaurant running smoothly. But I never imagined that a glitchy iPad app would completely redirect my career.
It started when the restaurant I was managing switched to a new POS system called Lavu. On paper, it was supposed to make everything easier. In practice, it was a mess. The software had all kinds of UI bugs — text on buttons wouldn't fit, data entered on the management side wouldn't transfer correctly to the POS terminals, and the whole thing just felt half-baked. Somebody had to figure it out, and that somebody became me.
I started creating workarounds — little hacks to make button text display properly, fixing data input issues between the web portal and the terminal output, troubleshooting things that the software itself should have handled. It was tedious, but honestly? I loved it. There was something deeply satisfying about diagnosing a problem and figuring out a creative solution, even if it was just making a restaurant menu display correctly on a screen.
That experience planted a seed. I started wondering: what if I could do this kind of problem-solving as an actual career? So I did what any millennial would do — I Googled it. Something along the lines of "best careers for problem solving and working with people." Software engineering kept coming up, and it clicked. I wanted to creatively help people solve problems through technology.
Going back to school felt like the natural next step. I'd already gotten my first degree in Psychology from the University of North Florida, so UNF was home. My brother had gotten his Electrical Engineering degree there and told me they had a strong STEM program. So I enrolled in Information Science and dove in headfirst.
The STEM program at UNF was a completely different experience from my first time around. I met mentors who genuinely invested in my growth, built a network of peers who pushed me to be better, and landed three internships that gave me real-world experience before I even graduated. I went from someone who had never written a line of code to building web applications, creating dashboards, and writing SQL queries for actual business stakeholders.
Those internships were pivotal. My first was at Regency Centers, a commercial real estate company, where I built Power BI dashboards. They were so impressed that when I couldn't be hired on yet as a first-year student, they referred me to Gottlieb LLC, where I continued building dashboards in Power BI and Tableau and learned how to communicate directly with end users. At Florida Blue, I got hands-on with product rationalization analysis. And my senior capstone project with The Giving Closet at UNF let me build a full web application from scratch using ASP.NET MVC and Azure. Each experience taught me something different and confirmed that I was on the right path.
I graduated Magna Cum Laude and landed a role at CSX Transportation, where I've been building enterprise software for over four years now. I work with Java, Spring Boot, Angular, MongoDB, and a whole ecosystem of tools that 10-years-ago me would never have imagined touching. I build microservices that support critical business operations, manage shared libraries, and architect APIs — a far cry from troubleshooting POS button text.
Looking back, I wouldn't trade those 10 years in restaurants for anything. They taught me how to work under pressure, communicate with anyone, manage competing priorities, and stay calm when everything is on fire — skills that translate directly to software engineering. When a production deployment goes sideways at 4 PM on a Friday, I handle it the same way I handled a full restaurant on Valentine's Day: stay focused, triage fast, and fix the problem.
If you're considering a career change into tech, here's what I'll say: your previous experience isn't wasted. It's your secret weapon. The soft skills, the work ethic, the ability to think on your feet — those are things you can't learn from a textbook or a bootcamp. Combine them with technical skills and you become the kind of engineer that teams actually want to work with.
And if a buggy POS system can spark a whole new career, imagine what your unexpected moment might lead to.