Thirsty? Here’s a fire hydrant.
A story of how I fell in love with programming.
I love to code.
….but this wasn’t always the case. I come from an abandoned portion of Los Angeles county that is affectionately referred to as “The Armpit of California”. My family was not rich by any means but we still managed to get by. I grew up influenced by all the things a white kid in the ghettos of L.A. would be influenced by. I loved Eminem. Believed success could be represented by a currency symbol and the nice guy finishes last and alone. My childhood dream of being a teacher was squashed by a culture that taught that teachers were unsuccessful people and I should idolize famous people. So how did a confused white kid from the same town as Afroman fall in love with programming?
The Unforeseeable Future
“I am not and will not ever be, a computer nerd” I am sure I have said at some point in the past, if not I’m sure I thought it. Once, my high school calculus teacher told me to go into programming because of my love for videos games and my ability to keep up in her class… to which I believe I said something like “Yeah, not my thing sorry, thanks though.” I mistakenly had this belief that in order to be a coder you had to meet the following criteria: eat cheese puffs; drink diet coke; be fat; pimply; greasy; white; male; live in mom’s basement; have no relationships and no hobbies. Unfortunately, as a seventeen year old boy born and raised in southern California, this is what my culture taught me programming equated to. I also had this sad misunderstanding that software and hardware was interchangeable and if you knew one you knew the other. Then in college I studied Environmental Science at Humboldt State University. For those of you unfamiliar with what that implies, it is one of the Hippy-est of Hippy-sciences… at the Harvard of Hippy-Schools. At this point in my life there was no visible connection that would have shown a path leading to where I am today. Fast forward three jobs, four deaths, three romantic relationships and eight years later and we get
(Denver, Code) => Love
During those eight years I spent some years in college, some years pursuing an entrepreneurship and some years climbing the corporate ladder. None of which lead me to happiness. I wasn’t sure where I would find happiness but it didn’t seem to be in any of the directions I went. I came to believe the missing element was art. I wasn’t happy because I hadn’t found my art form yet. I was never very good musically, I enjoyed writing but never to a point that I obsessed about it or it brought me great joy. The closest thing I had found to art at this point was bartending. I could craft drinks tailored to people and it was much like art, but it never said “with this, I can change the world”. Then I found my artform, it was programming. With programming I could build something from nothing, I could bring to life a thought, a vision, an idea. I felt like a wizard; give a specific command and make something happen in a seemingly magical manor.
The Ignition
Thanksgiving, 2014: I have a conversation with my uncle about my future. I tell him I have no idea where I want to go but I know I want to go back to school. I don’t however know what I want to study. He tells me about MOOCs (massive open online course) in which I can take archived online classes from major schools. The beauty for me was being able to sample classes from varying fields of study without having to invest any money or any set amount of time. I could start taking the class and if it didn’t grab my attention I could just stop the class and move on till I found a class that did. Luckily for me, I found a class that did and did it ever.
At the time I would sit outside in the garage in the mornings with the door up watching the world through my driveway while I study on my computer. One morning I began a class at about ten o’clock. The next thing I knew, my girlfriend was hollerin’ at me to come in for dinner. It was seven thirty in the evening. This class was “Intro to Computer Science”. A class that culminates in building a web crawler in python. To me, I had just built Google. From that moment on I was hooked. I took every CodeAcademy course I could, started reading Eloquent JavaScript (totally didn’t understand it) and started trying to find out what else was out there.
After a few months of doing this, I had built up a pretty good intro base of conceptual knowledge, but I didn’t actually know how to build anything or how everything fit together. It would be like knowing that a toaster toasts bread and you toast bread by inserting the bread and pressing the handle down. Seperately you know that an outlet provides power to electrical devices, but not knowing that you have to plug the toaster into the outlet. It seems so simple once you know it, but until then you don’t know what you don’t know.
I visited Colorado in May of 2015. I had a friend I stayed with that was a freelancer in Denver. He advised me to look into developer bootcamps and pick a city with one that I wanted to work in. I was living in Denver by August.
The Present
So here I sit, perched in my favorite computer chair chattering away on the keys of my Mac listening to peaceful acoustic music and looking out the window at the vast beauty of the state of Colorado. I know I need to rest my mind from code for a day, I just have to. You get to a point where your brain just gives up. I am not at that point yet, but I know what’s coming next week and I will need all the rest I can get. I go to school at Galvanize and attend the Full Stack program. The program is a full stack web developer immersion bootcamp where students learn to build sophisticated and quality modern web applications. In addition to the how to’s of building apps, students also are required to learn many other skills that are associated with web development. These things range from soft skills like continuous integration/continuous deployment and working on teams using a story tracker and agile methodologies to hard skills like being fully capable of applying our conceptual knowledge of javascript to an unfamiliar environment.
The Impossible
Our first experience into unfamiliar environments (for some of us the whole program was one big unfamiliar environment) went something like this:
Teacher: “Here’s the code for a live working Ruby on Rails app. Add a feature and fix a bug by the end of the day.” Go.
Class: “(insert vulgar word or phrase of choice here)”
Mind you the class had never seen rails code. It also was on a day when it snowed more than a foot in Denver and everyone was attending class remotely. The teachers also all agreed to not answer our messages in slack or help with the assignment in order to really shock and scare us. The purpose was to get that fear out of the way now, while in a safe environment and not on day one of our new jobs, where more than likely we won’t be coding in only javascript and freak out on people whom our paychecks depend on their approval. Much to the surprise of the instructors and probably even more surprise to ourselves, we did make a feature… All of us. In 8 hours we each taught ourselves ruby on rails using only a sample of working code and google searches. Rock on, as lead instructor Kyle would say. Since then we have all built small apps and servers in different languages like swift/xcode, java, go, python, C#. We even built wonderful group projects with unfamiliar environments like building native ios and android apps in addition to their web app. Some even hacked a chest freezer and connected a raspberry-pi with a socket connection to a server that allows users to adjust the temperature from their phones and can pre-program set times and temps of the freezer for the purpose of home brewing. This was all done in only four days of building with only four months of education. This class is unbelievable in the truest sense of the word.
It is difficult to comprehend the progress that is achieved throughout the course. The idea that anyone could go from being really good at making a martini to building one of those projects is not an easy thing to understand. Galvanize changes you. Its that simple, yet so complex. I think of Galvanize as being to the mind as Biggest Loser is to the body and what both are to the soul. My approach to life has changed, the way I understand problems is different, the way I spend my time, the things I love or find amusing, even my personality: the embodiment of my expressed self has been altered due to my time at Galvanize. Have you ever heard this: “If you want to learn (some language) you should just move to (some country), I promise you will learn it in just a few months”? If you have heard you will relate and if you have done it you will understand, coding is the language and Galvanize is the country of origin. Galvanize is fully immersive. By that I mean you live and breathe code. I ate, drank and slept Galvanize and code. Quite literally. Eat: Often I have had to rely on snacks provided by Galvanize and their wonderful staff because I’m either too immersed or just plain broke. Which is the perfect time to shout out to the people that keep everyone comfy, Russ and Chana, you guys are the cherry on the top of the sundae that is Galvanize. On behalf of everyone in the building, Thank You. Drink: Galvanize also provides you with much needed unlimited coffee and tea to keep you going, not to mention a free beer or two at the end of the work day when you need it. Sleep: My car got stuck in the Highlands late one night after the last train had already left, so ended up sleeping on a couch in the building.
The Unexpected
They do allow you freedom do as you please though, it’s not like a prison camp. You only commit to nine to five, but everyone codes much longer. Some leave campus right at five and code at home, many have kids they need to pick up or dogs that have been waiting for them, but many of us will code late into the night… every night. The craziest thing is that from an outside perspective I’m sure this might sound terrifying. Tortuous challenges and endless work, no life, no family no friends no games no FUN?!.. Twisted and demented as it sounds, we have loads of fun. I believe the long nights are actually due in part to the fun, without it there is no endurance for that kind of focus.
As previously mentioned Galvanized changed what I found to be entertaining and building cool stuff and solving difficult challenges became the fun. Think people who enjoy sitting down to a five hundred piece puzzle. They think it’s fun to try to solve the puzzle and determine the relationship and location of each piece. That’s a lot like how we spend our time but we take a hundred piece puzzle which in turn is a piece of a much larger twenty piece puzzle and try to solve it in a day. Then we come back in the next day and dump the puzzle on the ground and try to do it again. Sometimes for fun and sometimes, because we are told to. If you ever played with lego blocks image spending all day building a really cool castle and a big-kid comes in and kicks it to pieces and yells at you to make it with red blocks now. Or spending multiple days building a complicated city with different buildings and roads and all.. and the big-kid stomps through and demands skyscrapers. The great part of it is that you begin to learn that the big-kid is a welcomed presence. For instance, you now know how to build skyscrapers. Though I say all that in jest, the instructors are not bullies. They are not, as the etymology of bootcamp might suggest, drill sergeants either. They are wonderful people who genuinely care about the success of their students. They inspire enduring greatness and often see it to fruition.
The Reflection
On behalf of the class I’d like to thank Kyle and his team for their impact on my life. To the class, you inspired me the most. When I was at my most uncertain moments, I would be reminded by one of you where I was truly at in the course. I hope I was able to inspire the same in some of you.
-David Shibley
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