(I’m not gonna finish that title, I like the beginning but “Previously, On My Life” sounded just the worst. This’ll do, pig.)

This is mostly just a catch-up for me, to remember what I’ve actually been doing for the last few weeks, months, years. If that’s something you want to read about, cool, thanks! If not, there are so many things to read in the world, go read those!! Sometime in the last eight years, I decided I didn’t love finance, my college major. Then I graduated with a degree in finance, and got a job at a financial technology startup, and still didn’t love finance. (This is not a sob story - a person not loving their job or career path is the like bottom 0.1% of important problems - but hopefully it’s mildly interesting at worst.) I worked there for 3 ½ years (from graduation until October 2014) - honestly, much longer than I ever would’ve expected. The time there was stressful, draining, and led to several periods of burnout, obvious to coworkers and friends and family - but it was genuinely valuable. Every person I worked with was more talented, driven, and intelligent than I was; every day I learned something new about how to (or not to) make decisions in a company, small or big; I gained a respect if not a love for finance and investing, and a much better understanding of those who choose to pursue it; most importantly/relevantly for my own life, I (very) gradually understood what was important to me, both in a career and in my life.

What’s important to me in my career is that I’m interested in and engaged by the problems I’m trying to solve, and that it’s not affecting my own life or personality in a negative way. I considered the idea - for a while, like periodically between grade school and year 3 of that job, so maybe 10 years - of being a part of the movie industry. What part? Who cares! It’s the movies! It’s all fun! At about the aforementioned year 3 I realized I do care, and it’s probably not all fun - I didn’t want to spend years in a non-creative role with the distant/impossible possibility that someday I’d be a director. I love movies, more than most things, but I knew I’d have to throw away most of those other things to pursue that dream. So somewhere in year 3, I moved on. And that’s about when I started doing a few Codecademy courses on a whim. My job required a lot of Excel - if you’re familiar, I’ll pour one out for you; if not, skip ahead, or you’ve already stopped reading - and only when I started these simple courses did I realize that I was (very) basically programming already. The same skills - logical thinking and problem solving, working with large datasets, understanding how to write formulas - translate pretty well to actual programming. So I kept doing Codecademy. And started reading textbooks. And gradually started writing small programs. Eventually I made my own website (and the companion blog, both a serious impetus for learning programming). Somewhere in the middle there, I knew I could be, and had to be, a programmer. I liked learning about it, I liked writing code, I liked that I could use it to do pretty much anything. (Important thing to take away from that sentence - I liked it. That’s all I needed.) The question went from What Do I Want to Do? to How Do I Do It?

So in October, I left the job. From then until mid-November, I studied on my own - and struggled through making that website. Then I started a Web Development course at General Assembly. I have nothing but great things to say about GA - the people working there were wonderful, my classmates were engaged and diverse and genuinely kind, and the program is perfect if you’re just getting started in programming. But I realized early on in the course that I wasn’t just getting started; I’d learned a lot on my own already, and it probably wasn’t the best use of my time to learn it all again, in a different language (I’d been learning Python, they focus on Ruby). At that point I decided to drop the course and pursue learning on my own (GA was extremely gracious at this and every other point too - they talked to me and helped me through that difficult decision, and completely understood my difficulty - again, just the best people).

Days later, I finished my application to Hacker School - something I probably should’ve just done in the first place, but I was glad I did. (A lot of this blog will probably focus on my experience here, but if you’re interested, it’s worth reading everything on their site. They’re very open about their goal - to provide a space for people to self-direct their learning about programming alongside each other and together, while enforcing minimal structure - it’s definitely an adjustment from class-style learning.) I (miraculously) got in on the first try, and just started this past Monday. And so far it’s been a challenging, but stimulating, environment for learning. Consistent with my past experiences, everyone here is just the nicest - there are a lot of nice people in this world! It’s one of those crazy surprises about being an adult! - and help to preserve an environment where people can learn what they want, without the regular external pressure (quizzes, tests, grades, jobs, money, etc.) that tend to drive learning. Per their site - “We value intrinsic motivation and self-direction, and believe people learn best when they’re free to explore their passion and interests.” It might sound high-minded, or touchy-feely, or unrealistic - those all might be true. But they seriously strive to make that happen, and in the first week, that’s what’s happened for me.

I’ll try to keep this regularly updated - ideally every day - to give an idea of my experience at Hacker School. I’ll also go into technical stuff - like the actual things I’m learning - so if you’re not interested, probably don’t read those, because if you’re reading things you’re clearly not interested in and then getting mad later, that’s kind of a silly thing to do. (Also a thing I’ve done - why would I read all the way through a Buzzfeed quiz just to be angry about it?? Life is short!) That’s more so I’m sure I can clearly express what I’m learning. So what I’m saying is, this blog is really just for me - but hope you enjoy it!