| I've always wanted to be a programmer. Ever since I was a kid when I spent a bit of time in QBasic giving my friends unlimited lives in Snake and Gorillas. By the time I was nearing adulthood I knew that I definitely wanted to pursue programming as a career (by the standard-seeming path of getting a CS degree), so I joined the National Guard so I could pay for it. In 2008 I was working at Wal-Mart throwing boxes off of trucks and trucking product out to the shelves. Incidentally this was the best job I had ever had excluding my current career, and I still look back fondly on it. I had tried to go to the local technical college for their programmer analyst degree but quickly dropped out after I found that I knew most of the material and could not even test out of classes that were primarily focused on teaching you how to use a mouse. In 2009 my unit was deployed to Iraq and I resigned that I would try to go to a four-year college for CS when I returned and I had my VA benefits to throw around. Everything changed when I met my mentor (a figurehead in the Ruby community) online via a comment that I had left on his blog. I had been learning Ruby/Rails in my downtime during the deployment to that point and we continued to converse throughout the rest of the deployment. When I got back in 2010, instead of applying to college, I already a job offer waiting for me because my mentor decided to take a chance on me and hire me at the RoR consulting company he was CTO of at the time. Three years later, I've spoken at a conference, co-authored a book, and have been working in the career I always dreamed of because someone decided to take a chance on me. I owe the success of the last three years in large part to Chad Fowler and the rest of the awesome folks I worked with at InfoEther in 2010, and I'll always be eternally grateful for the chance I was given that led me to where I am today. |