Student Story: Ryder Timberlake

Ryder Timberlake doesn’t speak like most people, but then again, Ryder Timberlake doesn’t do anything like most people. He doesn’t temper his enthusiasm, either in conversation or in his pursuit of things he enjoys.

As an undergraduate, he followed his enthusiasm for Linguistics and Spanish by double majoring in both, later, he’d also pick up a Masters degree in Spanish Linguistics. “I come from an academic family and I’m sure that played a role. Languages was just what I was interested in studying.”

Despite the connection between studying languages and programming, it was actually a fairly winding road that lead the 31 year old to the February 2016 Back-End Engineering Course at our Indianapolis campus.

“I wondered about doing a whole bunch of different things after school. I worked in a cognitive development lab for a little bit, I was in India for four months. After India, I decided that maybe I wanted to be a doctor, and if I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to be sure before I invested $100,000 into that whole process,” he said. “In the end, I did end up being able to leverage some of the skills that I went to school for and that was how I ended up in medical interpreting in hospitals for three years.”

Even after such an impressive spread of jobs, it would still be a few more years before Ryder would make his way into an Iron Yard classroom. However, it was the commonalities he saw in the careers that didn’t work out that began to push him in the direction that would lead him to web development.

“I felt significantly, significantly underemployed, and there was a significant desire for more autonomy — to be my own boss. That’s what got me into trading stocks and options, which is what I was doing before in enrolled at The Iron Yard.”

It was when he turned his attention to coding that Ryder found something that none of his previous endeavours had provided him with — an outlet for his creativity. “It was some combination of money and analytical processes. Then there’s job security, and a strong historical outlook, but most importantly, I saw that coding was a way to leverage my creativity.”
 
 He continued “I’ve been an artist, of one form or another, pretty much my whole life. I’ve never made anything even remotely close to a sufficient amount to live off of. The fact that I would be able to actually be creative at my job and make something which I consider to be art…that was extremely important to me.”

Though the idea of coding schools had crossed his mind, within a few weeks of starting to learn JavaScript, Ryder was comfortable enough with his progress that he had ruled out code schools as an option. “I decided I wasn’t going to do it. I thought, ‘I can save money by learning on my own.’ Even though I recognized that I am a person who struggles without structure, I was having enough success that I thought that I could do it,” he said.

Although Ryder had ruled out paying for a coding bootcamp, he was still attending various Meetups in Indianapolis, including several at The Iron Yard. It was after attending these Meetups that Ryder began to reconsider his stance on code schools.

“I talked to Emily, I took a crash courses with Chris. I met Iron Yard alumni and current students, and they were all freaking awesome. They were getting good jobs and they were really interesting people, and the whole program was really interesting and it was really obvious to me that they were extremely well connected in the Indy-tech community,” he said.

“I thought about it and realized If I made this reasonable investment that I was going to have an easier time of it, because I wasn’t going to have worry about doing everything myself, I was also going to benefit from being in a group where everyone is struggling and striving and learning together. Also, I was going to have access to that entire Iron Yard network here in the Indianapolis tech community, which ultimately is where I wanted to work. “

Despite his success with coding, and all evidence suggesting that he’d made the right decision by joining The Iron Yard, Ryder wasn’t immune from the imposter syndrome that many code school students and programmers deal with. “I just didn’t know if I was going to be able to do this. I had so much self-doubt. Then, quite suddenly, after the first two weeks, I was totally fine. “

Now working as a Software Engineer at Salesforce, Ryder has a lot of ideas about the skills that make people great programmers.

“There are brilliant people in this field…far more intelligent than I am, but I feel like the people who most definitely succeed have a whole lot of interpersonal skills and ability to put themselves in the shoes of the user.” He continued, “The ability to think empathically about the other members of their team, and just about everybody requires some pretty hardcore interpersonal and EQ skills. I do feel that that is both more important than the technical aptitude and also is a better predictor of success. As long as the basic technical aptitude is there, I think the most important things are persistence, tenacity, enjoying problem solving and having the soft skills.”

When asked what he would say to anyone who’s hesitant about a bootcamp, or learning to code, his advice echoed that of many of our graduates: “You can code. Anyone can code. Try and make it fun. Try and find somebody who you can do it with.”

Follow Ryder on twitter @rydertimberlake.

Interested in learning more about our Indianapolis Campus? Check out more information right here:https://www.theironyard.com/locations/indianapolis.html