Life, new and improved

Ten years ago I got on a plane in rural Idaho and made my way towards Ploiesti, Romania for service in the United States Peace Corps.  Not only was that a big step but many before it and after have led me down such an amazing road in life.  Looking back at such a monumental anniversary it's nice to remind myself there are no regrets! Leading up to this I had a shift in my thinking.  "I have the rest of my life to work this office job, do the things 'expected' of me by society" and live up to whatever expectations I had built in my head of what life would be.  Here I was living and working as a professional in the career I had set out to start since day one of college 7 years before, but what was missing.  I had been working professionally for a few years and found my work exciting.  I was a coming of age gay man in the early 2000's Capital Hill neighborhood of Seattle.  A very exciting time to be there with protests, a budding design communi...

There was never any question in my mind when I started on this coding journey why I was getting into this industry.  I had seen models of great company culture, life/work balance, enthusiastic teams and engaging ever evolving work through so many friends' companies as well as job postings I knew where I belonged.   I have worked on and off for years in both great and terrible work environments.  In the end I've learned that the people are the single biggest factor in what makes a job worth giving up so much of your personal time.  Money sure, that's great, but in the end at a certain career level you have enough money to be fine, beyond that it's all just frosting.  When the money is no longer such a big reason as to why you go to work every day what is left?  The team you work with, the folks you connect with in other departments, the relationships you forge in those journeys with folks who quite frankly you spend more waking hours with than most...

As a baby coder I am blessed to have such an amazing mentor.  A big part of what he has taught me is through how he gives back to the community. One of the most powerful lessons he has taught me along the way is when you see a bug on a website, trouble shoot it and let them know.  Don't just email them that the website is broken.  You have some knowledge, use it to at least go through the steps to recreate the problem, take screen shots and send a real report.  Inspect the code and give specific keys to where the problem is happening on the UX side. I recently came across a bug in one of my favorite local vendor websites and was able to come to two simple possible roots to the problem.  I've found that the exchange is always received favorably and with appreciation.  In this case there wasn't much to tell or test but typically I advise to go as deep as you can. When my mentor has shared bugs with me he inspects the code, digs into what divs and ...

MY EXPERIENCE GOING THROUGH A CODING BOOT CAMP Add this to the long list of blogs out there about this style of schooling but I hope my experience can help others determine what's best for them as so many others did for me. I started my journey and interest in coding as I've always been a builder, whether that be building tiny houses, field camps, connections to other humans or software and web applications.  So I started learning on my own via freecodecamp.com, Udemy, and the list goes on.  The common thread for me was how hard it was to really buckle down and do the coding on my own.  I'd run into road blocks and spin on them for  hours with little resolution or I wouldn't be able to utilize the lessons to do anything outside of what they were walking me through step by step so the skills seemed less applicable.  I recognize these were all valuable tools but I was struggling to truly utilize them without a little more structure. So I star...