Finding Principle

"As the time is short, I will leave out all the flattery...Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives." ~Henry David Thoreau

In grade school, I spent my days dreaming of being an archaeologist unearthing long forgotten civilizations. In high school, I dreamed of playing sports, not as a career, but I just loved sports and did not see much further than that. Then I fell in love with reading novels and had a penchant for arguing. I ended up an English major in college. I dreamed of becoming a writer, but never really wrote anything. Nothing very good anyway. So I became a teacher to talk about books and coach sports. Problem solved.

However, I was not satisfied.

A Brief Introduction

2011, 6 years into my teaching career, I moved to Denver. I remember sitting in my classroom after a challenging period. Whoever thought mixing English Language Acquisition students from grades 6 and 9 together in the room never considered the gray hair it would cause me. Top of my mind as that moment: *what the hell am I doing?* I fired up my email and came across the subject line "Learn Ruby on Rails." After 15 minutes of walking through Codecadamy's tutorial and not really understanding what I was doing, I closed the browser.

Three years later, out of the classroom and into a central office admin role in Denver Public Schools. I remember overhearing a colleague mention "Dreamweaver" and thought it sounded so cool. Not only that, but in order to update our websites files, I needed access to the Dexter server. Mind blown and hello tech bug. Eventually, I maintained parts of our department's WordPress site through the CMS, but it was not until I worked closely with our software developer, Justin, to walk him through some business logic for an application that the tech bug turned into more than a spark of curiosity.

Justin showed me C# and SQL. None of it made sense, but the power of being able to create and solve real world problems was the hook line and sinker.

Getting on the Horse

A few weeks later, I needed a report created, but no one had the time to do it. Enter Pete the programmer. Stealing time between my main work, I hacked together some SQL queries utilizing a MS Access database, borrowed a VBA script to distribute PDFs to public folders, and had many conversations with anyone in the department I could wrangle a few minutes with. Two weeks later I had a functioning report that helped schools audit which students still needed literacy plans down to 6-7%.

This was the moment that I realized code was in my future. No idea how, but I felt finally like I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to make people's lives better by utilizing code to solve problems. So what's next?

Over the next two years, I incorporated code into all aspects of my work. I transitioned to an assessment specialist role where I was writing high school language arts assessments while also training district staff on utilizing a software as a service for assessment and data. I loved this work and it was pretty interesting. Part of it had me trying to find articles, literature, and poetry to include in assessments. Since our district budget was getting slashed at this time, we had very little extra money to pay to use more modern writing. This led to the public domain and an article titled "Life Without Principle" where Henry David Thoreau writes,

"Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages."

I was floored. How long had I been throwing stones over the wall to put money in my pocket? Shit, this summed up my parents, most of my family, majority of my colleagues, mostly everyone I knew at this point. It had to change.

No more stones over the wall

Enough was enough. I put a plan in place. I signed up for a course on Udemy to learn SQL. This was great as I continued to use SQL within my work in pulling data for schools, but it was not enough. I moved onto a web development bootcamp course. This was fascinating and I started to create my own application, but I could never hold myself accountable. I was learning JavaScript, HTML, and CSS at a slow rate and typically only a night or two a week after putting the kids to bed then spending time with my wife. On my 45-60 minute commute home from work, I listened to technology podcasts to learn whatever I could about code and stay up-to-date on tech terms/topics. Exposure was great, but not much stuck. I needed more.

Nights and Weekends

Thinkful's Nights and Weekends Software Engineering bootcamp sealed the deal. Seven months of 50 hour DPS work weeks with 30-35 hours of coding on top of it while trying to be a husband and raising two boys nearly wiped me out. It was difficult. Difficult for everyone. But I learned so much, personally and professionally. Here are a few:

1. I love learning.
2. I can learn anything and will never stop learning.
3. My family and I are capable of anything together.

But most importantly, I learned how I will spend the rest of my personal and professional life: leading a life with principle with my family at my side.