What lead you to this point in your career?

One of the most common questions I’ve been asked to answer in any interview, speaking to groups, or even teaching classes has been something along the lines of “How did you get to this point?” (in a career context)

I thought you had to be Insane to be a developer

When I first started my career I pursued the hardware side of the world specifically network administration. I thought your brain had to be wired for tedium, monotony, and borderline OCD to “enjoy” development work. I had tinkered with basic and some minor vbscripting, past that I had zero interest in development.

It all changed with cheap hardware

I eventually took a job as a network administrator for a company who saw IT as a necessary evil, an expense that you wanted to keep as low as possible, but couldn’t quite eliminate. As such our infrastructure was woefully out of date kept working well beyond it’s expected lifespan, and was frankly being held together by hard work and blind luck.

One of these trouble points was the backups for our engineering server, they required me to run the back up manually, cycle the tapes, start the next backup, repeat. The process took hours of “Hurry up and wait”. In frustration I spent a few days doing research and found people had automated the process using vbscripts, so I hobbled together a working script and that’s when the magic started… Hacking together a crude program had just removed a pain point from my day to day work forever…

Okay, hacking some vbscripts together from some forums isn’t exactly “dev work” where did the REAL dev work start?

After I wised up to the plight that was my day to day work as a “Necessary Expense” I decided to pursue greener pastures. This took the form of becoming a “Helpdesk Coordinator”.

This was a local government job as we all know software used in the US government is top notch (Note: heavy sarcasm) By that I mean our “Helpdesk” software was a Microsoft Access Database. (For Context, Microsoft Access is an excellent way to learn the basics of databases to get a better understanding at how the work, but is NOT intended for more than personal use)

Needless to say there was pain… so much pain… More than one person on it at once? well data can get messed up. End of each year we created a new database because that 2GB limit causes the whole database to seize up. Yeah… not a good time. Me being young, ambitious, and frustrated figured even if I did a terrible job it would still be better than what we were doing. (Note: at the time the most advanced thing I had developed was the aforementioned vbscripts)

So I knew Microsoft did software and had options and found ASP.NET (we’re talking old school ASP.NET, ASPX, SOAP, DLL hell, the “good ole days” that I’ll never miss) So between tickets I started digging into the ASP.NET website’s documentation and tutorials and put together an entire Helpdesk application from scratch that wrote to a MS SQL database. (They used it for years, and might still be using it, I dread what that code must look like because I really didn’t know what I was doing at the time)

In fear my job was on the chopping block (It was a “Non-critical” role and the local government was laying off en mass in response to the recession) I made the move from hardware to software taking my first development job else where.

From that point forward I was a developer

While these past eight months I’ve been writing course content teaching . NET development, I spent the ten years before that doing software development. I enjoyed a very successful career as a dev thanks to being both ambitious and someone who believes in constant self improvement.

If you found success why the shift to teaching?

I actually taught college PC Repair and Advanced PC Repair at the age of 19. I had a talent for breaking down advanced concepts in a manner non-technical people could understand and I loved that work because I felt I was really impacting lives. Unfortunately like the government role it was something I couldn’t count on. As an adjunct if my classes didn’t get enough students I had no class and no job. (It never happened, but I don’t like planning my life on “if”s and “hopefully”s)

Then way later in my career I took what I consider my “career misstep”. I was “chasing the money” and did so right into a nightmare job. Landing a lousy job wasn’t the misstep either, my misstep was ignoring all the red flags and sticking around for almost 3 years.

The job was absurdly stressful for no reason what-so-ever, after weathering all sorts of hell in that job one of my coworkers had to be taken to the hospital after the stress caused him heart murmurs. That was the wake up call I needed… There are few things in this world worth dying for and a crappy job that pays well isn’t one of them.

Long story short one by one the entire dev team quit, I was the last to go. (I wanted to make sure the next job wasn’t hell part 2) That job probably cost me literal years of my life with the level of stress we were under, it wasn’t worth it. The first red flag came barely a month after I started and I should have cut and run, but hindsight is 20–20 and all that.

From there I did contract work for myself for a few months, which was pretty successful, but the dev spark was dead. I was just doing work to keep an income coming in, the love died in that terrible job. Eventually I realized I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t going to be happy unless something changed..

Pursing an old passion

As I said before I loved teaching, so naturally after some soul searching I decided it was time to pick up the teaching torch again. I decided I’d pursue public education (for the record everything about becoming a grade school teacher in Florida is absurd, stupid, and makes no sense. I’m genuinely disgusted at how bad that situation is.)

Luckily I was pretty early in the process when a recruiter I had worked with in the past contacted me just to check in at how things were. I chimed her in that I was putting up my developer hat and going back into teaching. Even though Code School wasn’t one of her clients and she wasn’t going to see a dime for it, she knew Code School was looking for a .NET teacher and I was a perfect fit.

The puzzle pieces fell into place, and in a remarkably short time I found myself teaching .NET for Code School. Which for the record, has proven to be one of the best choices I’ve made in my life. On that note, being around people who actually care about development again brought back the dev spark.

That’s the story

That is my story from how I became a developer and how that lead me to Code School. If I were to impart any life lessons from this ride that I call my career it’s this. While we all have to sometimes do things we don’t like and have days we’re not happy, no job should make you miserable. As I put it to a former coworker (and I’m not the first to say this) “It’s okay to be ‘sick and tired’ once and a while, it’s when you’re ‘sick and tired of being sick and tired’ that you really need to change something.”

In other words no matter what you do, with anything we do there will be ups and downs, but when the downs out weigh the ups, it’s no longer “heathy” and change needs to occur.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this read into my back ground. Expect future content to be more focussed and development, career advancement, and the application of science and mathematics in modern problems.