About Me

My Programming Story

I first starting programming during my undergrad in the mid-2000s, as part of the required classes for a math major. I remember enjoying those Python and Java classes, learning about functions, then OOP, and even signed up for Data Structures and Operating Systems. Maybe I'll be a comp sci major, who knows? What followed... Was. The. Longest. Slog. We went through slide-after-slide of tedium, and very little code. I made a hasty retreat back to math.

A few years later, the company I was working for needed a way to share the results of survey data with its customers. So, I started building a web app using HTML/CSS/JS and PostGIS to do just that. Google Maps was only 4 or 5 years old at this point and it was still a marvel to be able to map data. I loved it. But I lived in small town, in rural Eastern Oregon. Once that ended, I didn't see an avenue to keep it going.

Life moved along, and 10 years later, I found myself working as a high school math teacher. I noticed that our school's teachers would spend a lot of time moving data around manually. After checking with the IT director, I set out to find a way to automate the task. Many months later, I had cobbled together an abomination of automation in Python that...lo and behold, worked! The thrill of giving time back to teachers was a heady thing. I continued scripting additional integrations of our back-end for the next few years. Rather than burning out on code, I just kept wanting to learn more and more.

In the spring of 2021, I committed myself to learning software engineering. I was working as a high school math teacher and spent the wee hours of the morning pouring over FreeCodeCamp, YouTube videos, and random courses. After 9 months, by the end of 2021, I had grown some, but not at pace with my expectations. I started asking around for advice, and a fellow veteran recommended I check out App Academy Open.

It was clear fairly early on in my perusings that App Academy Open would help me to learn how to engineer, rather that just continue cobbling things together. On January 1st of 2022, I started working through App Academy Open's curriculum.

And now you're all caught up! I'm in the middle of my studies, with an end in sight. If you'd like to chat, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or email me!