Hello, HackerYou.

Chris Cosentino
Jul 30, 2017 · 6 min read

A year ago, almost to this day, I sat down at a table at The Local, a restaurant and bar in the heart of Liberty Village in Toronto. Across from me sat an old friend and creative collaborator by the name of Paul Marc Rousseau.

At this point, I had spent quite a bit of time working alongside Paul Marc, both independently and with his band, Silverstein. It was through my production and engineering work with Silverstein that Paul Marc and I became acquaintances, and later colleagues and friends.

Weeks before this meeting, Paul Marc texted me out of the blue.

“Don’t think about this. How ready would you be to tech later this year?”

I remember reading this text while watching (like a proud father) my dog, Levi, galavant at the dog park with his new friends.

I froze. They wanted me? The studio guy? On the road, on the bus, week after week and month after month?

Coincidentally, this text came at an interesting time — after nearly 10 years living the proverbial struggle as an independent recording engineer and producer (that’s a blog post for another time), I was considering pivoting in my path and making a change in career. I had nothing to lose, frankly.

I replied. “Yeah, I could make that happen.”

Fast forward to my meeting with Paul Marc, a job offer was on the table. I took it. Months after that, 2 months of a full US and European/UK run as a guitar technician for one of the bands that shaped my youth were now under my belt. I saw some of the most breathtaking cities in the world, and I was paid to be there. I got to crack open a cold one with the boys every single night. Life goals? Achieved.

Most of my work involved figuring out why things that make noise weren’t making noise.

From the minute I hit send on my reply to the original question, right up to the very second the return flight touched the tarmac in Toronto, my life had been completely made new. Everything changed.

Everything except for one.

I still felt an itch for… something. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Still, I do like to think that I know myself… and I know that living with the feeling that there’s something else out there is a recipe for a trip down the existential dread rabbit hole.

I started reading. I started googling.

“What to do when you have a life changing opportunity but you feel like you belong elsewhere”

“Quarter life crisis how-to”

“I don’t know what the fuck to do with my life 2017”

(Okay, I didn’t really google that last one. The results are probably great though.)

On a long break between tours, I decided that the only thing to do was try. I looked into writing, I looked into business, I looked into graphic design — all things of strong interest to me, but the cost (in dollars and hours) versus potential payoff (in dollars and fulfillment) still brought me back to square one.

It was around April, in another frenzied Googlethon trying to find some kind of magic life WikiHow, that I stumbled upon a blog post by a software engineer named Haseeb Qureshi. He talked about how he began a career in web development from a background that is… well, decidedly not web development.

Before touring, I had taken some online courses in HTML and CSS just for the hell of it, and found that I really enjoyed it. It had all of the technical aspects that I enjoyed so much in my music production background. It involved the creativity of musicianship, just in a different format. For some reason, until I read that blog post, I never once considered web development as a viable career path.

In his article, Haseeb made some statements that were both motivating and of Twilight-Zone level relevance to my current life:

“Wanting to brush up my skills (marketing for startups requires lots of technical stuff), I began teaching myself some basic coding: HTML/CSS, Javascript, R.

Much to my surprise, I enjoyed it. A lot. Not only did I enjoy it, but I was good at it. I picked up ideas quickly, relentlessly attacked problems, and reveled in the myopic flow of tinkering and problem-solving. In a way, it reminded me of what I used to enjoy most about poker.

It began to dawn on me that: hey, if I became a coder, I could go into the tech world from the development side. Rather than market things, I could build them myself. And if I wanted to eventually go into entrepreneurship and found my own company, then I could build that product myself. Even from the financial side, as a coder, I could earn-to-give more quickly (since marketing for a startup doesn’t pay a whole lot). It all seemed to make perfect sense. Except for one thing: I was 25 and had hardly done any coding in my life. How was I going to get good enough to actually get a job, much less in the technology capital of the world?”

Haseeb then goes on to explain his experience in breaking into the tech industry by essentially studying coding until he was too good to be ignored, and getting into the top coding school in his area.

I thought to myself (as a decidedly right-brain dominant individual), “well, I know that if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s hyper-fixating on things…”

I started researching coding bootcamps in the Toronto area, and one continually stood out among the others — HackerYou. Every alumni review glowed with positivity. Graduate employment rate in the 96th percentile. It was a practical guarantee of a strong first step into tech.

One thing stood in my way — the notoriously difficult interview process and technical challange that HackerYou puts applicants through as their admissions process. Hundreds of applicants, cohorts of merely 30. I needed to be good if I was going to do this. Too good to be ignored.

So, as my background and life experiences up until this point may dictate, I did it. I threw myself into code. I started with HTML and CSS, and practiced until I couldn’t anymore. I breathed it until it was time to submit my application.

Two in-person interviews, an online interview, a technical challenge later, I received a phone call from Heather, the CEO and founder of HackerYou.

I got in. This was it.

This past Monday marks my first complete week as a student at HackerYou, and once again, my life has been completely made new. Everything changed. The middle ground between technical and creative is exactly what I’ve been looking for. As my unwitting coding-bootcamp mentor said in his blog post:

“I’m really f**king excited.”

This post is meant to be an introduction of myself, and a brief (not so brief?) summary of who I am and where I come from. But I also feel that I need to take the chance to extend a sincere thank you to the Silverstein family, Haseeb Qureshi, and of course HackerYou. Without the experiences I’ve had with each of you, the path taking me here would almost certainly be taking me somewhere else, and most definitely less satisfying. So… thank you.

In the near future, expect some more posts from me here, both on a technical and not-so-technical level. I like to ramble.

Chris Cosentino

Written by

UX Designer and Developer. Eternal Student. Toronto, ON//Pittsburgh, PA.

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