if(Holberton > Broadway) { …}

Who needs WeWork when you can code in your dressing room …

Backstage on Broadway. Stagehands suspend enormous set pieces above our heads to save space in the wings as costumers lug laundry baskets full of quick-change costumes, fresh from the steamer. Ushers slip inserts into hundreds of playbills, as my fellow cast members stretch, do their lip trills and vocal scales in the bathroom or any acoustically-appropriate nook they can find, mentally preparing themselves for another sold-out performance in front of seventeen hundred people from around the world.

Except me. I’m too busy coding.

I love Broadway — I’ve been performing my whole life, and am so incredibly fortunate to have been in three Broadway shows since college. The people I do eight-shows-a-week with are dedicated, wildly talented, and make me laugh every day. It’s truly a dream to be Broadway. It just isn’t mine.

In my ‘work’ clothes from Aladdin on Broadway.

While I always loved computers growing up — primarily through awesome city-building games like “Zeus”, “Civilization”, and editing short films on the earliest Final Cut Pro — I didn’t start getting into code until after college. I was an undergrad at Princeton for Sociology, where I began to witness how data and statistics could be a powerful tool for learning about society. For my Senior thesis, I analyzed Jewish Comedians’ stand-up albums by crunching numbers on the audio decibel levels of audience laughter. If only I knew how to write program back then, I would have slept a lot more (who am I kidding … I still had a capella rehearsal at 11 every night). Out of school, I killed time during our grueling Tech Rehearsals on Broadway by doing some basic coding tutorials, and fell in love instantly. While most of my castmates would get an an adrenaline rush from performing and singing, I was exhilirated when I finished my first mobile game app — albeit, made on one of those barely-any-code-required HTML5 programs, I’m not proud — I felt like a wizard. Now, every time discover the typo that had been plaguing me for hours, or find that a saint on Stack Overflow was kind enough to post a JSFiddle demo of the answer to my exact question, I feel that same magic. Even as a novice, I feel superhuman when I code, and it’s always on my mind. Perhaps a little too much — my co-stars understand that if I’ve nearly missed an entrance or been close to forgetting one of my lines it’s because I was focusing too much on one of those pesky “Medium” Coderbyte problems that I really felt should have been classified as a “Hard”.

I consider myself a Jack-Of-All-Trades. I’m always looking for new and exciting experiences, which include opening for and recording with Ben Folds, competing on CBS’ The Amazing Race (I vow to never go extreme sledding in Artic Sweden again), and making my own semi-viral Justin Bieber/Harry Potter Parody YouTube videos (a small but growing niche). I perform, I write screenplays and songs, I do graphic design, freelance videography and post-production (I’m proficient with the Adobe CS suite), I love board games, outdoor games, any games. I’d be thrilled to spend all day just adapting my favorite card/board games into web versions (I hate card shuffling, it takes so long). I’ve coded my own actor website (with Rails) and a Product Hunt clone for Hollywood News (with Meteor), my own Day Trading Strategies in R (the coding was decent, the trading, not so much) and I’m always looking for new and exciting ways to problem-solve using technology. I’ve dabbled in a bunch of different languages — first Ruby/Rails, a tiny bit of Java, R, then Meteor, recently Javascript, and now I’m interested in exploring Python — and while I would like to eventually find a language to ‘settle down’ with, I believe that the language agnostic approach of Holberton is perfectly suited to my needs.

I’m not applying to Holberton because I want a job. I’m applying to Holberton because I want a lifelong vocation. I’m thrilled to apply to this program because it gives me a dedicated environment to satisfy my voracious appetite for learning, and I anticipate being part of such an immersive, collaborative, project-based environment will only help me better understand real-world problems and equip myself and others with the tools for solutions. As I was drafting this piece, I got a call from my agents that I have an audition for a guest spot on a long-running drama series. The role? A “geeky-hot” computer coder. Thanks for thinking of me, but I’d much rather be the real thing than play one on TV.