Nerd. Socially-awkward. Pale skinned. I’m sure you can think of a few other terms for a developer. While this may be true for some developers, I firmly believe there is a large portion of developers, such as myself, that do not fall under these stereotypes. Thus far in my life, I have done such a wide variety of things I’m not sure what I could be “classified” as.
For a start, I have lived in five different states (Florida, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas) and between high school and college, went to seven different schools. Growing up, all I would ever do is play baseball and fish. This is one of the great perks of growing up in central Florida. Just before my junior year of high school, my family bought a chicken farm and moved to Arkansas. This was quite the relocation, but I fell in love with Arkansas and the rural environment. Due to a serious injury during baseball, I transferred to four different colleges and ended up in Dallas, Texas.
Dallas. What a change.
The best thing that has happened to me in Texas was starting my development career. One of my baseball teammates at UT-Dallas introduced me to coding and it almost instantly consumed my life. I would get home from practice and code for hours on end.
I quickly enrolled in some programming courses at my school and started to feed the beast. During this time, I was working a college summer job at Lowe’s when a customer came in and started to talk to me about school and what I was wanting to do with my future career. When he found out I wanted to work in web development, he offered me an internship at his company on the spot. This was more of a godsend than I can possibly explain. My first programming job!
At his company, Joe East Enterprises, I helped create new, maintain, and build landing pages on various company websites. It was a terrific learning experience and really expanded my knowledge in the field.
After about seven months there, my internship ended and soon thereafter I was hired as a development apprentice here at Agency Entourage for the summer. Almost immediately they started to test my skills and put me to work on some difficult projects. I spent the entire summer soaking up as much as I could from the other developers, probably annoying them a time or two with my relentless onslaught of questions. At the end of the summer, Agency Entourage kept me on as an apprentice while I finished school. I kept learning more and seemed to always have something engaging to work on.
At the end of the year, one day before I graduated from UT-Dallas, Agency Entourage offered me a full-time spot. So now I am here, nose deep in code, doing exactly what I have wanted to do for quite a while.
