Lina’s Entrepreneurial Journey: From Physics to Code

From Physics to Code: How a Lebanese graduate defied the odds and founded her own SaaS

I believe in building in public to help inspire others and give my projects visibility - The Newsletter is one new medium for that to happen. Make sure to subscribe to learn more about how I pulled a career transition to tech, became a software developer, and a SaaS founder, and started building a career in the world of software

Who is This?

My Name Is Lina Rawas. I have been developing my own SaaS for 3 months now, and sharing bits and highlights of my journey of building a software product and communicating with clients with the software community on LinkedIn. Chris reached out to me through that same community and offered me The Newsletter to share my journey on the one hand and generate content relevant to the community on the other that could inspire others going through a similar journey. Needless to say, I agreed and here I am!

I’m initially not a tech person, nor am I a CS grad or engineer. 

I graduated in physics a little while ago. I never despised physics or wanted a life away from it, however, before graduation and after consistent reevaluation, I decided I didn’t want to have an academic career. 

My choice was made after many considerations. Given all that I had discovered about what life might look like if I were to go for higher academia in physics, the high unemployment rate, and the compulsory life sentence to be an immigrant my whole life if I want to choose something exciting in physics. 

I decided that it wasn’t a life for me.

Here came a problem, I needed to find a new career path that I might enjoy, and find worthy of spending enough time to pursue in my prime years of life. 

One fact about myself is that I am infinitely interested. My interest level in everything in life can ignite the whole universe and the multiverses of all the galaxies that exist or might ever exist. This is primarily the same reason why I got into physics. If I had the choice and the years, I would study every other degree and major there is, but for the sake of mortality, I chose the one that I believed would make the most use of my university years. 

Switching Careers

I went into a deep rabbit hole of searching for career choices that fall under the following criteria: 

1. Doesn’t force me into immigration to find good opportunities

2. Is financially rewarding

3. Will persist for at least 10 years in the future

4. Is interesting and makes me excited to work

5. Something I find intuitive and can excel at

After extensive research, my choice landed on technology, and I found many different opportunities to get into it, and many different tracks to get into. There was Software Engineering, Web Development, AI, ML, etc..

But for the sake of availability and pragmatism, I went with software engineering and became a FullStack Engineer, it was the choice that was most available to me and that had the means for me to get into, and it is a great start into a career in tech that I do not regret. 

But that was not an easy switch.

Getting into the field took me 2 years, the first of which was a bunch of different non-tech jobs that aimed to finance me throughout my shift.

In the second year, I joined a 2-month course with SE Factory to learn Data Structures and Algorithms in Python language, then, I got accepted into a 7-month intensive web development boot camp at Codi 5 days a week from 9 AM til 5 PM.

But in reality, we weren’t working 9-5, we were working 24/7 non-stop to meet deadlines and deliver projects with all the needed requirements. 

In the teams I worked with, I was able to learn the LAMP and MERN stacks, allowing me to build and ship over 6 projects within 5-6 weeks each.

I gained priceless value from that boot camp and unprecedented experience. I learned the small details of CSS, all the way to database design, considering scalability, and resolving conflicts both within the code and the team, and I knew that I would eventually build something on my own in the future. Being in the technology field has taught me one essential thing: I have to adopt a consistent habit of always learning new things.

If you’ve been or are going through a similar career-shift journey, do tell!

Post-graduation Clarity

After graduation, I realized some things about the job market.

It’s about not waiting for junior developer roles; though there are a lot of jobs in the market, and though the market is not saturated yet, these jobs demand great expertise, and uniqueness even for a junior-level job opportunity. 

And I realized, If you don’t take your time to differentiate yourself from others in the field, by building impressive and unique projects and understanding deep concepts in databases, data structures, etc., you won’t get ahead as a junior. 

In summary, I didn’t get lucky while job hunting and it took the majority of my time for three months after the boot camp. I greatly reconsidered my rush into applying and started thinking about what I might improve or change. 

It was a decision at the right time as it aligned with opportunity. 

Seizing the Opportunity

It was then that I overheard a problem from a business owner, a problem that I believed I could find a solution to with software. 

Specifically, by building a SaaS for similar businesses to solve this same problem. 

But What is a SaaS? What did my software turn out to be about? 

That will be a conversation for the next article, until then, I hope this article inspires others who might be stuck in their career looking for a switch, juniors having a hard time finding a job, or anyone who might think they’re doing something wrong. If I made the switch and built my own thing, with enough persistence and determination, you could too.