My journey to deciding to enroll in a software engineering program began in the early 1980’s. My father was still living at home at the time and he had a strong interest in electronics. It was fashionable for hobbyists at the time to enroll in correspondence clubs where once a week or once a month they’d receive in the mail a piece to a larger project and put it together over time. This particular time, he was putting together a HeathKit computer from Zenith. I recall seeing him solder together a board of integrated circuits to a few transistors and diodes. Over time, it began to look like a computer. I began to get interested in this myself. On the day it was ready to function, my mother’s uncle who was trained in computer science while in the Marines in the 1950’s came by to help get it going. It seemed like it took longer to start the computer than it took to start an old car in the winter. But eventually, there was a green monochrome display of:
BOOT>
Once it was completed, my father lost interest in the computer and moved onto other electronics. But my uncle gave me a few books in the BASIC computer language, and I was eventually able to get a CLI version of the casino game Blackjack working. I got into this BASIC language as much as I could, until I hit my teenage years and became more interested in playing guitar in a band.
The next time I actually needed to know anything about programming a computer was when I was working in a theatre, and the lighting designer needed someone to program her lighting cues into the lighting board. She showed me some basic syntax to get going and then I became intrigued again as to how much of the theatrical lighting could be automated just by learning the language and syntax of the lighting board. It turns out that quite a lot of it can be, and there are at least a few lighting designers working on Broadway who majored in computer science in college and not theatre. I eventually became a lighting designer myself, a path that I found very rewarding in that it provided me the opportunity to work in dozens of cities across the UK, USA, Canada, Italy, and the United Arab Emirates.
More recently, and more decisively, while working as an equities and commodities trader for a proprietary trading firm on Wall Street, I found out that the software that they used could be automated to enter and exit trades based on criteria that could be programmed in, but only if you knew how to program in the computer’s language. It turns out that this language was similar to C++ which I didn’t know anything about. But I took it home and fooled around with it while I thumbed through the manual. My partner was watching this. At one point, I jumped up and yelled, “I found a formula that would have predicted the price of silver movements and made us a fortune over the past two years!” She said that I said that at 8pm. By midnight, I was still at it. She asked me, “If you found what you were looking for, what are you still doing?” I started rambling that I’m learning how get this info printed on the screen, and get the colors to change, and the font of the numbers larger, and have a bell go off, etc…She pointed out that it seemed like I was more interested in getting the computer to do what I wanted instead of actually caring about the price of silver. She mentioned that some of her ex’s were software engineers and they were exactly like that, and that perhaps I’d enjoy taking classes in learning to code.
That was the beginning of my journey to finding a school to explore the world of software engineering. I saw that Flatiron School had a prep course, and so I figured that if I resonated with the prep course, I’d enjoyed the full course. I learned that I did indeed find the material for the prep course engaging. So, I took the next step and applied.