Code at Any Age: How I Switched Careers
“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”
While German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke’s original axiom related to military affairs, I have found it equally applicable to my three-decade career journey as I moved from law to finance to coding.
In one sense, my coding journey began in a fairly common way. I took my first programming class when I was in seventh grade (on a trusty TRS-80) and programmed all through high school in BASIC on my Apple II+. But tech was very different back then. There was no World Wide Web for the general public let alone smartphones. Even coding resources were scarce — you basically had books, magazines, and maybe, a teacher at your high school or local community college who knew something about programming. I was reminded of this while listening to a coding podcast where the guest was someone from my generation and he was talking about transcribing programs (meaning manually retyping them) from Byte magazine. The host’s tone could best be described as “wait, that was a thing?” while I was thinking, “Oh heck yeah I did that”.
When I got to Duke for college, this lack of resources and, frankly, lack of glamour in tech, led me to choose Public Policy rather than Comp Sci or the like. With that degree in hand, my original plan was to work for a couple of years and go back to law school. Two years at a big New York City law firm disabused me of that notion (despite an excellent LSAT score). So instead I moved to a small NYC mutual fund company, first doing legal and compliance work and then moving to the investment side as an analyst (starting in oil and gas, an assignment that led to many trips to, and a lifelong affinity for, cities like New Orleans, Calgary, and Houston). That led to about 20 years of work in the investment industry split between mutual funds (including managing a telecom fund during the original internet bubble) and bank trust departments. But I then elected to take some time off and that allowed me to ask the age-old question “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
As I pondered that question, I realized the answer was coding and web development. Since a traditional CS degree was out, I opted to go the bootcamp route. Ultimately I elected to do an online cohort through Chicago-based Actualize. It was a 12-week intensive full-stack bootcamp and I learned a ton. I was then my instructor’s lead TA for her next two cohorts which was great, I got paid to take the course two more times and nothing helps solidify the concepts more than teaching them to someone else.
My first stint as a TA was also my first exposure to Major League Hacking. I participated in the 2018 Boston Hacks. Frankly, it was kind of terrifying at first. I was heading down to BU with no team, much older than basically everyone there, and with about three months of coding experience. But it turned out to be a great time. I partnered up with a couple of other hackers who had come without a team and we got a pretty solid MVP developed as part of the ‘Giving Back to Veterans’ track.
Following my work as a TA, I landed a contract position. It was a hybrid position as technically I was hired by a local web development agency here in New Hampshire, but my only client was Boston-based True Fit. It was a wonderful learning experience though I also learned some of the challenges of being one of the only remote workers (meaning you’re the person they usually forget to tell stuff to). At that point, I assumed my new journey into coding was well on its way. But remember that opening bit about plans and enemies? Well first the pandemic hit and then life hit, hard.
In October, I found out that a large lump in my leg was in fact a very large (26cm) soft tissue sarcoma or tumor (a fairly uncommon form of cancer). Now when people think of tumors, they tend to think small because most are. Let me assure you, this one was not. It takes a while to wrap your head around a diagnosis like that, especially when you’ve never had anything wrong with you in your life. But during the first meeting with your care team, when they start using words like “death” and “amputation”, it focuses your attention pretty quickly. Treatment involved multiple rounds of chemo (three consecutive 8 hr days at a time), nearly a month of radiation, and finally surgery. Yes, it’s about as fun as that sounds — in Yelp terms, “one star, would not recommend.” And because it was 2020 and one life-threatening condition wasn’t enough, I tossed in a heart attack in the midst of, though unrelated to, treatment. The good news is that, as they used to say in The Six Million Dollar Man, “we have the technology, we can rebuild him.” A simple stent procedure took care of the cardiac issues, the surgery was successful, and my first set of follow-up scans were good, so I am officially NED or No Evidence of Disease.
MLH has played a key part in my path to recovery. The tumor prevented my sitting or standing comfortably for close to six months and as result, I did no coding of any kind. Shortly before surgery, I got an email about one of Jacklyn Biggin’s Technical Interviewing Prep webinars. Since my doctors and I had finally achieved some pain relief, I decided what the heck. Now Jack was wonderful, but it was horrifying at the start because while attempting the first challenge, I realized I had lost all of my coding syntaxes. I knew what I needed to do, but had no idea how to do it. I kept at it and it slowly started to come back. I decided to do Local Hack Day: Share. I joined Blahaj Gang since I “knew” Jack and did about half of the week-long event from my hospital bed at Mass General. I followed that up with MLH INIT and finished in the top 75 in total points (yes, I know the points don’t really matter, but give me this one please…) and following that, became the proud owner of a Blahaj, not wanting to wait to see if I could finagle one of Ryan’s 19.
Back when I was living in NYC, I went to a comedy show and one of the comedians had a line that “stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.” I think the same can be said for cliches. The cliche that the last year has reinforced for me is “that which doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.” I wanted to conclude this by sharing a few things that I have learned this past year that I think may be helpful for many of you.
You can’t control what life throws at you, but you can choose how you react. Hopefully, none of you will be dealing with the sort of issues I have the past year, but most likely all of you will face your own challenges and curveballs from life. The more you can face those challenges with optimism and openness, the better off you’ll likely be. Now that is not to say you have to be strong ALL the time or can’t have bad days. I certainly did. Those times are fine as long as you don’t let them consume you or wallow in them.
It’s okay to ask for help. I confess this one took me a while to learn. Having grown up in New England, there is a deeply ingrained attitude of self-sufficiency. But eventually, I came to understand that friends and family sincerely wanted to help and that brushing off such offers with “oh no, I am fine” didn’t help me or them. I think this is applicable more broadly than just a health crisis. For things like job hunting or coding issues, friends and even strangers to a degree are happy to help. The key is to give them something finite to focus on. For example, if you’re job hunting and you ask me “can you help me on my search” that’s not terribly comfortable. I may have no clue how to help you. But if you ask something more specific such as “do you know someone at Company X” or “can we practice a couple of interview questions” (I do interview training for recent grads of my bootcamp), I am much more likely to say yes AND actually, be successful in helping you.
Be willing to fail or you’ll never find your limits. Post-surgery, I have been working hard to work my leg back to ‘normal’. This has involved lots of time at PT, exercises at home, and time at the gym. Recently, emboldened by getting up to 25 minutes on the elliptical (still a far cry from the 45 I used to rip off with ease, but way better than the 5 I managed that first trip back), I decided to try running through my neighborhood. It would be impossible to call that effort a success unless you count on being able to tie both running shoes, but now I knew what my current limit was. The same thing applies to school and hackathons — don’t be afraid to take chances, to push yourselves. It’s impossible to hit your full potential if you never leave your comfort zone.
I hope that sharing my story demonstrates that life will almost certainly throw you a curveball or two (which is quite evident through my career and my battle with cancer). Know that you don’t need to have your entire life mapped out while still in school because your plans will most certainly end up changing at one point or another. Take peace of mind knowing that the MLH community will always be there for you along the way as has been evident in my journey into this new chapter of my career! Going forward, I fully intend to participate in future MLH events and hope to see you at Local Hack Day: Learn which is coming up on October 10th through 18th. Feel free to say hi if you see me at another event, in person, or on Discord (My handle is Internet Hippo).
