Dear Future Me: A Decade of Dreams with Brooke Sweedar
From fresh grad to future visionary: A raw reflection on embracing change, overcoming fear, and chasing dreams. I challenged Brooke Sweedar to write a letter to themselves in 10 years.
Brooke Sweedar is a recent fullstack BootCamp graduate from Louisiana State University who has recently exploded on the content scene where she has been documenting her journey into Software Development. It’s amazing to see people taking a chance on themselves and daring to chase their dreams. It’s not easy.
I challenged Brooke to write a letter to herself in 10 years. What are her vulnerabilities? What are her dreams? I wanted a deeper look into the mind of someone who is undergoing this type of transformation inside our industry.
She delivered, in spades. Her letter in vulnerable, it’s honest, it’s full of passion.
The Letter
Dear Brooke in 2034,
As I sit here and write this in July of 2024, I am officially a fresh BootCamp graduate. It’s only been six months since the official start of our journey into Tech, and our life looks completely different than it did even a year ago. I’d never before felt like I had any sort of vision for my future until recently. Now, addressing myself in 10 years, I find I’m full of hope, ambition, and genuine excitement for whatever will come next.
I’ve just survived one of the most stressful yet rewarding periods of time I’ve ever faced. I’m unbelievably proud of how much I’ve overcome, but I also realize that this really is just the beginning. Soon, I’m going to be entering the job market to land my first-ever Tech role, and in some ways, this feels even more terrifying and daunting than the BootCamp. It’s as though I made it through the first couple of levels, and now it’s time to face the “final boss”. Right now, the job market is bleak - not just for freshers, but for professionals at all levels.
My current focus is to continue to upskill myself as thoroughly as possible while continuing to network heavily on LinkedIn. Right now, we’re close to approaching 7k followers! Again, this is one of those things I could never have predicted just a few months ago.
When I think about what our life could look like in 10 years, I have a few things I hope you’ve managed to do. First, I hope you’ve continued to take chances on yourself despite uncertainty or the unknown. Six months ago, I decided to push past pretty much every comfort zone I’ve ever had, and it has been the best series of decisions I could’ve made.
Second, I hope that wherever you are and whatever role you now have, it’s making a real impact in this world. The greatest accomplishment I can imagine would be to know I’ve helped people in a way that matters. I know for a fact I’ve only been able to get where I am even now because of the kindness and support of so many others. Success is not a one-person game, nor should it be.
Third, and most importantly, I hope you’re happy. For too many years in your adult life, you settled, you kept your head down, and you had endless cycles of “Oh that could never be me” and “This is just how it is”. We know better now, and it would be a damned waste to go backward after all of this effort and growth. Life will never be perfect, but it can be great.
It’s exciting to think that maybe in 10 years, you’ll have a cool management role in big tech, or maybe you’ll have gotten involved in a sexy and crazy successful startup. Maybe you’ll even have decided to humble yourself and learn C# along the way… we’ll see.
I can’t help but wonder if you’ll ever get more comfortable with the idea of failure. The biggest lesson I’ve learned recently is that the only way to effectively grow is to make mistakes, to get embarrassed, to feel the fear and do it anyway, to mess up, to risk looking like I have no idea what I’m doing. It still feels terrifying, but the rewards have far exceeded the risks every single time, plus the lessons I’ve learned along the way have truly been priceless.
Of course, I have no idea what the future holds, but I do know that I won’t give up. I can promise you now that I will be working towards creating the life I’ve always dreamt of, and I will continue to dare to dream. I hope that when 2034 comes, I’ll be reading this with a smirk on my face, a ton of exciting experiences collected along the way, and you’ll be proud of all I’m going to do to get us there.
With all my love,
Brooke
Closing Thoughts
I love the optimism in this letter. It caused me to pause and think more than once about my own mindset. As a junior I was so spurred by the moment in time I was in, I was excited by the future, the learning curve was scary but conquerable. I take this mindset for granted in recent times as I give myself a hard time more and more.
I think we can all learn a lesson from Brooke’s outlook on wanting to make a positive impact and wanting to be proud of herself. I think that most of us, if we look back at all the daily trials and tribulations over a decade which have turned into journeys frequently trodden, we would be proud of ourselves.
Finally thank you to Brooke for entertaining this idea and delivering wildly above expectations. It’s been a pleasure to work with you.
More About Brooke
Brooke Sweedar is a recent fullstack BootCamp graduate from Louisiana State University. Her passion for technology and building community has propelled her to make a career change into software development. She enjoys spreading humor on LinkedIn, inspiring and educating others who are trying to break into tech, and spending time with her cats- Winston and Captain.
See her interview on the Dev Leader YouTube Channel with Nick Cosentino Dev Leader.
Hey folks, this is Ryan with another edition of The Software Engineering Times. I look to enable the future and current generation of technology leadership. You can subscribe for free and get weekly issues straight to your inbox. Paid subscribers get the full archive of issues, access to free resources, templates, special offers, 10% off coaching, and access to a private community.
This newsletter recently hit 4,000 subscribers, that’s so wild. Just quickly whilst I have you:
Check me out on LinkedIn. Im at >50,000 followers now.
Have a discount or deal that my paid subscribers would be interested in? Let me know and ill add it to the paid subscribers only area.
Interested in some form of sponsorship for this newsletter? Hit me up.
Just like every good YouTube opening, please like this (click the heart button at the bottom) and subscribe. It really keeps me motivated and gives me heaps of help.