Going from “Oh No” to “Let’s Go” to “Keep Going” with Coders Who Travel Inc. -- Ashley Michelle Orf

Posted on August 14 2025

I ( Ashley Orf ) just finished the The Coders Who Travel Foundation (CWT) inaugural 'Veterans Can Code' (VCC) program and wanted to share my three-month experience as a recently transitioned Army Veteran.In early August of 2022, I received an email invitation to join a semester course for military veterans called Veterans Can Code guided by Coders Who Travel. CWT is a non-profit committed to providing coding skills and certifications to young ambitious talent in emerging regions like Ghana. They recently expanded their program to another underrepresented group, US military Service Members and Veterans. As a 7-year Army Logistics Officer and Veteran, I can attest that coding is not a typical skill employed by the military unless you are assigned to the cyber security branch. I was interested to join VCC with my limited coding experience and was largely driven by my natural curiosity. I am also starting a new, post-military career as a business consultant where we often work with technology workstreams in solving manufacturing problems. Many consulting problems today are more implementation heavy rather than advising which makes coding much more relevant for a client project.I appreciate the CWT Instructors— Akua Oseiwah Ahenkorah , William Ampeh , Theophilus Siameh , and Jiyad Ur Rehman —giving me and my Veteran classmates the tools and the confidence through learning Python, a beginner friendly and versatile coding language that is also in high demand in today’s job market. They kept us grounded on our learning journey and were empathetic in the process. We were introduced to a variety of subjects that included variables, syntax, useful operators, if/else statements, arrays, functional programming, and visualization capabilities through importing graphs embedded within our coding. I am by no means an expert, but I am confident in my ability to continue to pursue this hobby and to negotiate the many 3-foot walls when it comes to coding. As a new consultant, I am very interested in using coding to solve and perform data analytical functions as an alternative means to Excel. MS Excel is over 30 years old and has its limitations. Coding through languages like Python provides a far more powerful means of importing and manipulating data with other added benefits of being easier to reproduce and easier to debug with the onset of advanced interactive environments to find and fix errors.Despite my natural curiosity, I am convinced, the hardest part of the journey to learn to code was telling myself I can code and to overcome the mental and social inertia I had in learning this skill. Even though I was quick to sign-up for the course, I had to remind myself at times to “Let’s go” in learning this weird, cryptic world of symbols, numbers, and letters. Positive self-talk is important when you hit those roadblocks. Strangely, almost like a runner’s high, I did find coding almost therapeutic around Lesson twelve or thirteen where I felt like I was trying to solve a puzzle. But it took like twelve lessons to get there. Additionally, you will find that sometimes it takes a village to solve a problem, and this was even true for our instructors who would introduce us to what we called the “Python gym.”  The gym is how we jokingly referred to the vast online libraries, cheat sheets, and forums that we could use and flex our brains as we immersed ourselves in “wheel designs.” Never reinvent the wheel with coding. Through VCC, I have found that Python coding not only exists for your problem, but probably ten times over with the rich online coding community that exists. I appreciate the humility of our instructors and their openness to learning new ways to solve problems.One helpful tip when it comes to coding is to always keep an open mind, which I found helpful and a reminder as a budding consultant. Coding is cyclical in nature as underscored by the Data Processing Cycle where there is a constant churn of transforming, visualizing, and modeling data. Additionally, there always exists multiple ways to solve data problems and to make your code more efficient. Always welcome the different paths to a solution and possible improvement to your own code. It is the journey not the destination. As someone who was pursing coding as more of a hobby, this rang very true, and I think will make your beginning experience in coding more enriching. Also, give yourself ample grace.Just to reiterate, I am the walking definition of a beginner when it comes to coding. I learned some SQL in college, but that was nine years ago. Coding was not offered at my high school nor was it an activity that was introduced to me through my extracurricular activities like Girl Scouts or even STEM high school courses. Coding was not something modeled by other girls or professional women in my social sphere growing up. The opportunity to code only arose during my undergraduate studies when I voluntarily took one SQL database course. I enjoyed it but it was a random pursuit at the time. Now that I am in my 30s and starting my new post-military career, I wanted to give coding another try. Data has become the equivalent of oxygen in our modern day lives. It’s ubiquitous, it’s exponentially increasing, and it’s here to stay as technology continues to evolve. Like taking my own proactive actions in protecting my personal data, I wanted to learn to code to better harness the power that data processing provides. Even if you are not interested in pursuing this as a career, there is potential within coding that can enhance your career.  To learn to code is your own personal choice. If you choose to start this journey, I recommend VCC and Coders Who Travel who will walk alongside you with that first step. Let’s go.REVIEW'Veterans Can Code' through The Coders Who Travel Foundation was a fantastic experience and opportunity to learn a new skill and expand my social network. As a beginner coder, I found the instructors to be very knowledgeable and empathetic in making our learning journey a bit more personalized. Additionally, the diversity of our instructors and their career experiences made our course work relevant and engaging. I appreciated having fellow Veterans in my course who I could relate to during the challenges of the course and transitioning to a new post-military career. The course curriculum was manageable and chronologically built on itself to help us build confidence and culminate with a project presentation at the end of the semester. Administratively, the course ran very smooth and on-time with Afia Owusu-Forfie , our class leader and moderator, extremely personable and valuable in maximizing our learning experience. We had the opportunity to interact with our instructors during live sessions which also offered flexible office hours. This was critical during our end of semester project work course recordings that were provided on the course site. We also had guest speakers that provided interesting and broadening topics such as understanding data and logical fallacies in statistical analysis which made us better well-rounded users of data. VCC was an excellent experience and increasing my confidence to continue to learn to code with Python so that I can enhance my career as a new consultant by analyzing data more efficiently.