Why Bloc?

One of the lessons I have learned from working so many jobs is that there is a direct correlation between how large the pool of people is who can do your job and how much you are paid for said job. Working as a cashier at 7-Eleven? Hope you don’t mind minimum wage. Working as a Sales Associate at T-Mobile? Well, not everyone can be a salesperson and not everyone knows a lot about phones, so you won’t get minimum wage, but there’s still a fairly broad selection of people who can do the job—so the pay falls in the “lower middle class” realm by American standards.

That meant I had to build up a skill that played to my strengths, a skill that not everyone can do. Given my love of electronics, my incessant urge to make order out of chaos, and my determination to make an impact on the world, programming seemed like a good fit.

But how to learn it? I knew that I needed to get some sort of formal education in the matter; again, my workforce experience made that all too clear. it’s not as easy as saying “I can program” on a resume and hoping that the business you want to work for will take your word for it. Besides, even before I knew how to write a single line of code I knew that there were several different programming languages to choose from as my first language, and I wanted some help with making that decision from a source that was smarter on the subject than I was.

My first temptation was to try taking a course at Galvanize, a web developer bootcamp which has a few locations in Northern Colorado and teaches full time courses in web development. But this would have meant quitting my job, which was not an option with so much college debt over my head and all the financial struggles my family was going through in the back of my mind.

It took a Facebook ad (of all things, right?) to make me realize that what was being done at Galvanize during work hours could be done at any time of day I wanted online. Bloc offered a course that would teach me HTML (HyperText Markup Language, a sort of “skeleton” programming language for websites), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, a supplement to HTML that makes it look prettier and less like a 90’s website), and two languages that are often used to build web apps: Ruby and JavaScript (for interacting with databases, creating animations, and other fun things like that). But where other courses would only offer enough training to become a web developer, Bloc’s course taught the concepts of software engineering—which is to say, web development plus training in building databases and algorithms that websites rely on—and guaranteed that I would get a job in the field after completing the course or my money back. When you sign up, they even let you pick a mentor to help you every step of the way.

It sounded like a smart bet, and so far it’s paid off. I’m only on week four of my seventy-two week, part-time course (Bloc lets you choose your own pace), but I’ve learned a ton about web development without having to sacrifice my current job.

And I’ll be sharing all that I’ve learned right here!

Post number 2.

Who I Was

The first time a teacher ever told me that I stood out among my peers at school, I was not told that I would make a good programmer. I wasn’t even in Math or Science class, the classes most often associated with computers and programming.

Instead, I was in English class. After reading aloud a creative story I had written to the rest of the class, my teacher told me that I would make a good writer. I took the advice to heart—maybe even more than I should have—and was bent on becoming a fantasy novelist for all of my teenage years.

At the time, it seemed like the right course for my life. I loved reading fantasy novels, so much so that my copies of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings would fall apart in my backpack. I read so much that the rules of spelling and grammar were burned into my brain, helping me to win the Spelling Bee in sixth grade.

But I made a mistake in taking the teachers’ advice too literally. I thought one offhand compliment had dictated my destiny, and that since I was good at writing, it was what I should do for the rest of my life. So I kept on writing stories even though they never really fulfilled me, went to college as an undeclared freshman because I was filled with doubt, and hopped between about a dozen different jobs trying to figure out who I was (I’ve been a cashier at Toys R Us, 7-Eleven, and Target; a salesman for Comcast; a taekwondo instructor at ATA Family Martial Arts; a delivery driver at Silver Mine Subs; a grill cook at Qdoba; a dough cook, pizza line cook, and host at Old Chicago; an opinion columnist at The Rocky Mountain Collegian; a sales associate and assistant manager at Simply Mac, the Apple retailer; and a sales associate at T-Mobile during my time in the workforce).

With every passing year, I struggled harder and harder to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. The pieces were all there: my talent in writing was not a sign that I was creative, but instead evidence that I had a mind for rules and structure that others didn’t (given my obsession with organizing books and movies alphabetically and chronologically as a kid, this came as no surprise to anyone who knows me but me). I loved electronics, particularly those made by companies that focused more on quality than quantity, from a young age—first with my Nintendo consoles, then my first Apple product (an iPod Mini), and nowadays my MacBook, iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch. I had known for years that whatever career I might have, I wanted to make a positive impact on the world, and that the intangible impact of entertainment or the minor impact of a job as a sales associate or a waiter would not satisfy me. And after watching my parents struggle with their finances and accruing a mountain of college debt myself upon graduating from Colorado State University with a Communications degree, I knew I would not settle for a job that left me struggling to pay my bills each month.

I wanted a job that combined all of these elements. I considered every path imaginable—and time and again, despite my doubts about the daunting task of learning to be a software engineer, I kept coming back to the world of programming.

Now it's time to move forward.

 Post number 1.