Born in Texas and raised in a small town, I spent my late teens and early twenties dreaming of living in “the big city”. Lucky for me, I was in a nu-metal band during that time that decided to see how far we could go so I moved to Austin when I left college to pursue that dream. While I never became a rockstar, I had an amazing time in that pursuit and had experiences that most will never know! It was an amazing chapter of my life, but I was a married man and felt the need to “have a grown-up job” so I left the band after 7 years to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I spent a few years after that working various jobs and readjusting to life, but I knew I needed to find a profession/career.

I eventually ended up working for IBM Global Services as an IT guy for the area AT&T call center and garages. A couple of years into that and I even started a PC repair business on the side. Being an IT professional was something I enjoyed and was exceptionally good at, so I figured I’d found my calling and started studying for some certifications. Something interesting began happening, though. I began writing VBS, PowerShell, and WSL scripts to automate many aspects of my job as patterns emerged and I found myself doing a lot of repetitive tasks. These scripts were eventually incorporated into a desktop app I wrote, so I had an interface for using my massive collection of scripts, and IBM even published that app internally. At a certain point, I realized that I had loved writing code since I was a kid with an Apple II computer that wrote terrible games so I had more to play. I was a computer science major in college as well. After 6.5 year in and as IT positions were disappearing to automation, I thought “I should just write code for a living like I originally set out to do”.

I discovered coding boot camps and started doing some research to determine if I thought they were worth the time and money. Once I decided that this was the way forward, I studied a little and got accepted to one in Austin, sold off most of everything my wife and I owned, moved her and my son in with family, and took the bare essentials to Austin with me so I could crash in my buddy’s guest room on a blow up mattress for 3 months while I attended classes. Low and behold, I went from not understanding much of modern web development to having written libraries, Angular.JS apps, and more in that time. I was offered my first junior dev job 8 days after finishing that boot camp. All these years later and I realize that the risks I took to get to this point in my career were the best decisions I ever made!