Good for you. I'm in the middle of a similar career shift. I studied food science in college with bright-eyed dreams of entering food product development. Instead, I ended up a front-line supervisor at a factory and it was the most miserable experience. I knew I was good at programming and I was obsessed with it as a young kid, but it was never something that I felt was "cool" to study and none of my friends did anything like that. (Girls don't like computers, that stuff's for nerds! And I still felt like that in college, even at a heavily engineering school.)

It makes me really happy to see other women become programmers after other careers. We aren't alone!