Learning to code has been a practice gaining control of my life. I’ve had dozens of jobs across just as many industries, which has led me to many exciting and worthwhile experiences. That said, I’ve hit a point in my life where I’m starting to question my purpose. I’ve always wanted to help people, but being constantly caught in the rigamarole of paycheck-to-paycheck jobs and questionable living situations has made it rather difficult for me to identify ways that I can contribute to the greater good of society that won’t require more energy of me- energy that I definitely don’t have.

Enter: coding. I followed a reddit post to a twitch streamer, and 9 months later, I’m confident enough to start looking for work. The intense learning process gave me purpose all throughout lockdown, as I worked jobs I didn’t really want to be at, and made money I couldn’t really live on. This sense of purpose has been enough to sustain me for months. Recently though, as the intense learning regimen starts to wane, and the job hunt begins to wax, I have found myself a bit lost for purpose. Do I really want this? Can I really do this? If I do, will I still want it? Doubt, as it always does, begins to ooze in through the cracks.

That is until Hurricane Ida swept through my home city of New Orleans. I know what you’re thinking, “why would a major natural disaster give you a sense of purpose?” Maybe it’s a bit backwards, but when everything falls apart, it exposes the nerve endings of your experience to you. I evacuated, but it became immediately clear that I needed to help my city. I had no idea how to do that from thousands of miles away. Okay, hundreds of miles. You get the picture.

And then, during a particularly productive shower (shower geniuses know what I’m talking about), an idea struck me- what’s the thing I’ve been learning how to do for months? Build web-apps. What’s the full-stack project you’ve been working on for months? A map for people to locate pop-up restaurants around New Orleans.

Boom, 15 hours and a late night later, New Orleans Resource Map was born! I used the code for my original project and retrofitted it to map resource locations for New Orleans residents to be able to find in easily in their vicinity.

Now, anyone who has ever built anything knows that if you slap something together during a stress-induced frenzy, it's going to need a lot of edits. Just the idea of building something to production that is going to be rife with problems is usually enough to stop me. This time was different, though. I felt a sense of purpose. I felt that if I built this project, I might actually help someone out, least of all myself. Did my resource map help anyone? Yes- I know for a fact it helped me to have something to focus on while the status of my home was in question. But besides me, did it help anyone? Well, I'm proud to say: yes. Not a lot of people, mind you, but enough folks reached out to make me feel good about what I created, janky as it is.

I'm proud that I was able to bring an idea from concept to production, and that the product was helping people find food, gas, water, and whatever else I was putting on the map. It was also invaluable as a fledgling developer to have a live product that needed improvements, as people who had ideas weren't shy in their critique (maybe they could have been a little more shy...). I even had another developer reach out, and we teamed up to improve some of the basic functionality of the map.

I'd love to tie this story up with a neat little bow, but the truth is, I can't. Although the app fulfilled its function, which was to help people find resources during the aftermath of Ida, it still needs a lot of work. Furthermore, what became incredibly clear is that there is a dire need for projects to continue to evolve to a rapidly changing world. This isn't the first major disaster that New Orleans has faced, and it certainly won't be the last. In fact, the effects of Hurricane Ida are very much ongoing, and as I type this another storm is threatening to set the city back even further. We're going to need as many tools as we can create to help people.

I may have found my own small way to help, but what was revealed to me was far more valuable: my purpose.