Programming Throwdown - From Combat to Code

Episode Date: April 30, 2019

Hey all!! Today we are sitting down with Jerome Hardaway. Jerome is an Air Force Veteran and the founder of Vets Who Code: a non-profit dedicated to training Veterans in web development and connecting Veterans to hiring managers around the World. Whether you have served in the military or not, this inspiring podcast gives us all a glimpse into the boots of someone who rotated into a career in software development after school, and is full of great advice for newcomers to the field. Learn more about Vets Who Code, including how to donate to the cause, in the show notes below! We have more interviews in the future, but the next two months will just be Patrick and I. Keep sending us emails with topics that you want us to cover! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/04/episode-89-from-combat-to-code.html ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

programming throwdown episode 89 from combat to code with the jerome hardaway take it away jason hey everyone as patrick said, we have Jerome with us. Jerome is a combat veteran, and he's started his career out in the military, and then after that has moved on, and we'll kind of listen about his story and also the amazing work he's doing with a group called Vets Who Code. And along the way, he'll be able to tell a lot of us something which I know a lot of people out there are interested in, which is how do we sort of retool? Maybe we've done one career for five years, 10 years, 30 years, and we just get this passion to get into software development, get into engineering. How do we go about realizing you know that dream and that's what we have uh jerome here to talk about today uh roger that hey guys how you doing it's a very uh very good day and like awesome to

meet you guys so thank you for having me cool so why don't you start by kind of walking us through, you know, did you go in kind of through university to school? Did you go from high school to the to the military? What was that transition like? How about military to civilian, civilian to coder? Like kind of walk us through that whole story. Roger that. It's kind of like military to veteran. Like you're not you're never like back to never back to civilian. You're a civilian, military, veteran, and then while being a veteran, you're a programmer.

I see. Okay. when I was a wee glass. I ended up going straight into the Air Force from high school. I actually was at a performing arts high school, and I had a scholarship to go to college, but it was in something. I didn't have real passion, and I couldn't see myself, you know, in orchestra and piano and stuff forever, and doing crazy things with that so i ended up opting for the military and one of the things that kind of happened was i wanted to actually do something in the war on terror was really at its apex at that point so even though i had high

enough scores i chose to go towards the security forces route. In retrospect, it probably was a silly thing to do. But when you're 17 and, you know, hocked up on testosterone. So what was this like around 2001 or what? Oh, no, this is around 2004. 2004. Okay. Yeah, I graduated in 2004.

I'm old. I'm not that old. So that was, yeah, I mean, that's true. So September 11th is what I was thinking of. But then, you know, after that, there was just, you know, there's this sort of this escalation, right? And so when you were getting into it, it was still, you know, it was really hot. It was really heating up it was really yeah the it was a we were transitioning from the way we used to do combat operations in the military

which more regimented to this more dynamic um dynamic flow when i look at it from like what i'm doing in tech now to how we're doing military it was very very unique on how similar those things were because it it was like agile methodologies and combine just had long military names for using aef cycles and things like that when you call aef cycle we call a sprint right uh some stuff like that so it was very very unique in how the as i've gone from you know how as i went from rookie to you know being military and few deployments and in under my belt and uh as i'm in tech how the not how that skills and experience transfer has continuously like you know shifted so you know just how things are different but yes I went in security forces and did a few I did it went to Iraq from the camp uka all

right when they're gonna stand none close location doesn't have a name yet but we were there didn't have a. Then South Korea and a couple of other crazy full deployments that I don't talk about because I don't want to get in trouble. We don't need someone kicking down the door right now. I don't want anybody in a suit asking me any more questions for a very long time. Totally. Yeah, so I was there i was in uh operation

doer freedom operation iraqi freedom and once i ended up uh decided i was gonna leave the military in 2009 it was under this uh guys that you know db 214 was going to be my magic ticket what is that so i don't actually know what that is the magic the dd you know magic the magic ticket is a joke about willie wonka right yeah that's how veterans treat their dd 214 basically dd 214 is the paperwork that you get when you leave the military that states that hey you have fulfilled your service in the military is you know it's your magic ticket because like once you have your successful term if you're honorably discharged um it basically opens you up to all your veteran benefits like gi bill um what gi bill veteran housing loans stuff like that

uh veteran business loans stuff like you know it's all those systems that you know it's the magic ticket though hey yo i can go out here and do amazing things what they did not tell me was that at the time when i was getting out because you know the bubble thing is real and there's no uh more concrete bubble than the military bubble uh so they didn't tell me when i was leaving in the military i said there was this thing called a great recession going on yeah i had no idea what was going that that was i was like you know skipping out the gate and what was going on when i when i was out i really you know i was getting this thank you for your service but your skills aren't – we don't have anything for you or you don't have the skills for it. So just to give some back, what did you go into the Air Force to do?

I was security forces. Essentially, it's a combat career field, combat security career field. Got it. combat security career field uh yeah so uh when you spend you know half a decade carrying an m4 carbine and a nine millimeter you know when you get out of the civilian for um in the civilian sector uh unless you're doing that there's not really a lot of jobs that are open up to you yeah so yeah so i was 2000 so so I'm 2009, 2010. I'm looking around. I'm like, yo, I'm being told that, you know, thank you for my service, but you're essentially useless in the civilian sector.

Don't like that. That sucks. What do I do to fix it? I happened to see this commercial on Facebook about, like, learning how to code. They had some guy that was like, I think he was in the Miami heat. He was a like tall, tall guy. He was,

he was a computer science major as well, but he played basketball. Now they had Mark Zuckerberg in it. And will I am that I do remember that annoying code. Or a commercial will, will I am in it? You're like, you know, I never saw that, but I can, with Will.i.am in it? You're like, shut up.

You know, I never saw that, but I'm picturing in my head, you know, somebody with a really high-pitched autotune voice, you know, telling me to learn C++. You know, it's like, I don't know. It was a high pitch, but Will.i.am is just annoying. So, please, Will.i.am, if you're listening, no hard feelings. Don't hit me, IRL so yeah so i was like what is this programming stuff i actually happened to have had a book that i picked up randomly while i was overseas i just had it with me about databases and i was

like what is this and i was doing some research this book, decided I was going to go through this SQL stuff that was in this book. About six, seven months later, had my first job working at-profit and working there as a quote-unquote marketing assistant but if you ever worked in the business of non-profits if you're the youngest person at the non-profit you end up handling all the technology stuff because it's just like non-profits are essentially like uh well classical non-profits as i like to say they're essentially like, well, classical nonprofits, as I like to say, they're essentially like going to your grandmother's house or your grandpa's house. Like, you know,

you need to like, you need to already know the wifi password or they don't know how to work the VCR. The VCR is blinking 12. I was just thinking that, you know, I go to my parents' house and it's still doing that. My dad thinks it's a Zenith 12 and I just don't, he's seven old i don't want to break it to him you know but yeah i mean i don't

want to tell him that i'm afraid if i set the time that he's just gonna you know end up wandering somewhere yeah so uh so i was there thinking i was going to be doing a lot of design social media marketing things like that and they were like hey you you're young fix our website and i looked at this website it was like something that was outside of like jurassic park like it was still like a 90s style website like geocities the flowers follow the follow the mouse cursor yeah it's horrible just sad like sadness all. So I spent three months going through that, learning PHP, because this is, I think, this is 2011, 2012. So this is before the, quote, unquote, big JavaScript boom. We haven't, you know, Node.js hasn't, like, dropped, dropped.

Like, you know, when he dropped Node.js, it was like when Drake dropped his mixtape, right? We all went like, everybody went crazy. So you know that analogy. So we were doing that with PHP and a CMS, content management system. I'm trying not to use acronyms because some of the people who are listening may be students. And I was like writing the worst php code you could imagine had no ideas about styles any of that stuff uh learning color theory and design psychology and ux um all on the fly really enjoyed it really loved it found out i kind of started finding

that my passion was you know ui and u UX engineering from that, you know, experience. In three months, I had the first iteration of a, I guess, back then, modern web. But if you look at, like, what modern web is now, like, now that's an ancient artifact, right? It's really interesting how, in hindsight, you could kind of put the pieces together. So you have this background in music, which is about sort of art and symmetry and then you have this whole sort of experience in the military and then you come back and you're doing web design again kind of focused on front end and and you know being able to build sites with symmetry and art and stuff like that well yeah see um i think there's a book

out there and they they talk about like the most successful people um in industries like the elon musk of the world they have a unique ability called uh skills transfer challenge transfer whatever you want to call it in which they're picking up things and they're applying instead of trying to learn it from a whole different point of view they're using up things and they're applying instead of trying to learn it from a whole different point of view they're using what they learned in their past and doing a knowledge transfer of those skills to apply it to the other things that's something that helped me with learning how to program i um i kind of broke down like when i was in the military, I broke down how learning my M4A1, like how you would break down learning sheet music.

And then when I was learning how to code, I broke down the understanding of front-end development or full-stack development now, the way you would break down our understanding of a weapon. You know, and that's how I teach my veterans as well. I break it down from the concept of, you, we're starting the most basic concept. So it's like terminal and Like so I'll teach a command line or terminal then I'm teaching how to use git then while we're doing git We're also going to be learning how to use git flow and then while we're using git flow

We're also going to be learning Kanban and then once we move on from that We're going to start we're going to move on into the Chrome browser. Then once we go from Chrome browser, we're going to also start doing the debugger. And now that we're doing that, now we're going to go to our text editor because text editor uses the same tools that the debugger use, such as console and things of that nature. And from now we're in text editor, now let's start learning HTML. Now let's start learning CSS. Now let's start learning JavaScript.ml now let's start on css now let's start learning javascript right yeah so yeah so that's how i've been you know that's how i train that's how you know that's how i train myself that's how i teach you know very um you know a

very regimented way so that way you know i can focus on a fundamentals and each skill grows upon each um itself and you know you're always using that skill like to do something else right so that's just uh basically what helped me you know keep moving my career forward and things of that nature fast forward to yes so so what about like you know one of the big issues i think in in tech and this might be even more broad it's probably more broad than tech but it affects tech i think the most right now is that there isn't really a solid accreditation and so and so for many places what you have to do is you have to get this four-year degree where you learn you know art history and sociology and these things which which you know some people appreciate and some people don't,

but they're not relevant to being able to build a solid website, right? So not everyone necessarily wants to go the academic route to get into web design or any field like that. And at the moment, you know, the whole trade school idea of tech is just still kind of at the sort of baby phase, right? And so I think this is one of those areas where people in the military who have sort of this kind of culture and that knowledge base are at this disadvantage because people are just kind of looking for that certificate right so that is a big problem yeah what would you tell employers um you know that something that that sort of you know you can like wrap a lot of military folks around and say this is some unique skill set that you know just about everyone from the military, just about every veteran can bring to the table. What are some things that you kind of learned in the military that any tech employer would really love to have, right?

Professionalism, being calm when there's a situation going on, even if you don't know what's going on being you know attention to detail those are all things that we come that you need in programming or anything in tech that you know you're taught like in the first three months in the military because you know we hold attention to detail very high because you know our in our jobs lives are at stake so you know while people are you know you're at facebook and your attention to detail may cost a lot of money you know in the military your lack of attention to detail may cost someone um you know may cost someone their life so that transfer of that you know

that works well i think you hit the nail on a lot of the things that I tell both employers and students right on the head, though. When you said skill set, I tell people it's a skill. What you get into it is what you'll get out of it. You know, that's just the nature of the piece of programming. You have to, you know, it's no different than, you know, working out. It's no different than if you wanted to do ballet, if you wanted to learn how to play the piano, if you want to learn how to paint, if you want to, you know, just same way with driving. Like now, how many of us was the last time you thought about driving when you were driving? Yeah, it's just unconscious. Yes, because you've been doing it forever. You've been repeating the same concepts and same maneuvers every day for years. That's the same way programming is.

Right. So it's a game to game out. World champions aren't made because they, you know, go and get a certificate or, you know, the best mixed martial artists in the world. They are not the best because they got a black belt and they stopped. They are the best because they kept training every day. You know, a favorite. I'm the first book I make. Most people who once they say join are I guess are what it's not truly an executive team it's like once you go from troop in

training to like community member and you're doing things in the program and the product on the product side first thing I haven't listened to is Jocko Willink's discipline equals freedom Equals Freedom Field Manual Volume 1. Yeah, it's my favorite. One of his chapters is like every day is Monday, which means you have to arrive and show up every day and be ready to give it your best.

There are no dates off. And that's how I look at programming. You have to learn. Things like that. I try to tell people I'm not special in any way, shape, or form when it things like that. I try to tell people I'm not special in any way, shape or form in terms of programming. I don't feel like I'm some, you know, rock star programmer. I've been in the game, I think, five years, five, six years, maybe. I'm a professional that's getting paid with the term programmer in my title.

If I go back to when I first started writing code, longer than that, maybe seven, eight, nine years. But, you know, five years of getting, you know, oh, yes, he is definitely a programmer. He's officially a programmer. Like, I feel like you're a programmer when the check says you're a programmer. So, like, that's just, like, I know there's people, like, you're a developer when you decide that you're a developer. I'm like, I'm a developer when someone pays me to do it.

Like, that's how I felt yeah that makes sense i think it's totally right that that that you know the people you know practice that that skill every single day like i uh i'm trying to get more into exercise for health reasons i'm not if anyone's seen a picture of me i'm a skinny guy i'm not going to be you know professional bodybuilder i can barely uh uh you know lift stuff it's a little embarrassing when i go to the gym but that's fine be, you know, professional bodybuilder. I can barely, uh, uh, you know, lift stuff. It's a little embarrassing when I go to the gym, but that's fine. Um, but yeah, I was watching this video of this person who, uh, um, what is a professional bodybuilder.

And, uh, he said, you know, I go to the gym every single day. He said, you know, on Christmas, I'm at the gym. He's on my birthday. I'm at the gym. And, um, I think that's, you know, there's so many things in life where you kind of need to, you start off in this state of like, let's say, unconscious ignorance. You don't know even what to know. Then you learn, okay, I need to learn, let's say, Node.js.

So now I set this bar. There's Node.js. I don't know what it is. I need to figure it out. And then you say, okay, I've learned it. I can write some basic things. You know, I have one computer that's always on Google or Stack Overflow helping me and the other computer is where I write my code or two screens. And then you get to that state of unconscious understanding where you can just open up, you know, a text editor. It doesn't even have to have the highlighting and just start writing code

because you've been doing it for so long. And just like any skill, my uncle was a carpenter and he would tell similar stories about that skill. And yeah, I think it takes a ton of effort, but the best people learn to sort of get the most out of kind of every hour and have the dedication to put in all of those hours

yeah you're absolutely right that's why i tell um from even from our entry level on our program to you when i'm talking to hiring managers i'm like you're going to get more out of somebody that shows a willingness to work than someone that has an aptitude for it. Because those people who, particularly those people who are willing, like the way we do it is that we have pre-work. It's the lowest metric that I think I could find. There's no fancy code challenges, nothing like that. We have pre-work where you need to do this stuff

in order to get an interview to be part of it to code. And you'd be amazed how many people don't want to do that. And the ones who do it, they end up coming in and getting to become super successful and reaching their goals. Well, that's because the first thing that we do is we're saying, hey, you have to work. You know, there's that saying that success looks, you know, looks a lot like work to people. And that's why people, they're not lucky. And it's the same concept at VWC. I try to let them know.

Every day I am writing code. I'm reading code. I'm watching videos on code. My favorites, Google recommends stuff. There's nothing I can't type that Google recommends something, Google will recommend something code related to it. Um, I'm always on medium. I'm always on GitHub. I'm always on stack overflow. Uh, front end masters has become, I mean, you know, I have this philosophy of making your homies, your heroes, I mean,

your heroes, your homies, right? So front end masters is like my go-to for years. And now I'm such a big, proponent of front-end masters and that that they became a big fan of my work and now they're giving uh my troops free front-end masters accounts right so it's like that yeah so like it's cool that i'm able to pass that on but like that's how steadfast steadfast of a fan i am i am of always learning always improving um same concept with like my board members i have made you know set shot he was one of my first board members that i brought on and he i was his biggest fan because i learned ruby the hard way learn python the hard

way things like that we end up becoming friends and then go to join my board like these are because like i am always trying to ingrain these skills in my board like these are because like i am always trying to ingrain these skills in my life like even my house like i have like um i think 12 of the lights and here i have google action set up using javascript and then yeah i have google home set up and i'm having i'm working on all this stuff so is it like a voice thing where you say you know like star trek turn on the living room and it just does it? Trying to figure out a name for it. We picked Hyperion,

but like it does like, we're trying to find a cool name for it, but it's a lot of voice activated stuff. We have also, we're using a, what is it called? Like these IOT things, like always get away from me. Oh, like the, a what is it called? These IoT things always get away from me. We're making it.

I know the... Not Arduino, the other one. There's Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi, there you go. We're taking a Raspberry Pi and we're going to make a smart mirror as well and we're going to connect a smart mirror to the APIs that we're building in JavaScript and APIs that we're going to connect a smart mirror to the apis or building a javascript and

apis that we're using like we're there's so much stuff that i'm just like i try to incorporate the things that i'm learning and trying to master to every level of my lifestyle right and that's why i try to push to my troops like you know even like when they do their final projects they ask me what they should do i'm like you you're the product you're the project like there's you're so much you're so interesting if you weren't interesting uh facebook wouldn't be free to everybody and they wouldn't be like doing everything by ads right so i was like you're interesting like but look at yourself like you're boring to you because you're you every day but when you break down like i make like um this week We did, it's our fourth week of a new cohort. And one of the things that they had to do

was they had to write a JavaScript object and they had to write in that object, a property value of everything that they, about them, right? So everything they want about them. And I was like, so some of these people have these giant objects called you or their name and they're doing like like one troop has you and their object is like 100 lines long so i'm like yeah i love it so now we're going to teach you how to put that variables do functions dot map dot

reduce all this stuff so that way you can manipulate this data so about you to be able to tell story and put this information where you want it. This is going to be your first step. Now you're using this giant object and then you're going to move on into using JSON objects instead of this giant object. Like, this is a monster. You shouldn't be doing this in production level code. And then we're going to move on to use APIs because this is how the natural progression

of that, right? But you're- Yeah, very cool so like that's just how i'm always trying to push them to think of themselves in that concept of like yes try and walk us through like vets who called who code so you're a developer um at what point did you say um i want to um it probably was in your mind the whole time but at some point you had you said to yourself you know i'm more useful as sort of um like a conduit or or um you know someone who can really get other people off the ground and so at some point you

had to kind of you know quit your day job and go straight to vets who call kind of walk us actually i don't think we've always explained vets who code too so kind of walk you know, quit your day job and go straight to Vetsu Code. Kind of walk us, actually, I don't think we've explained Vetsu Code, too. So kind of walk us through that whole story. I think it's fascinating. Roger that. It's funny. It's like, oh, fake news. Like, the best part about Vetsu Code is that it has helped my professional career.

I've not had to stop working. Oh, nice. Yeah, I work at CVS as a software engineer. I work on, like like i got my dream job because of the work i've done with vetsu code and building things uh uh comicbook.com like i don't know if you guys probably know enough about me like that because i don't let my geek flag but i am the biggest captain america fan and i have been a Captain America fan since like at least July of 2007 so like I'm a huge Captain America fan and like I have how ridiculous embarrassing about Captain

America so I'm not gonna get like that that's awesome podcast because I don't know y'all like that y'all don't make fun of me I don't want to get hit with a shield or anything so uh well we are irls but yeah so you know the things that i needed the best thing about that to code was and and simultaneously working because i've been employed the entire time was a i didn't want an organization where i was building something and taking it like i wanted to do the future of non-profits and when it came to technology uh the biggest when i was when i was a i mean i don't know if you can tell no that's i'm a minority in the south um so you know you have those disparities that come against you and we think people are listening jerome is african-american just because

you know people are listening might not know what you're talking about. Yeah, what are you talking about? So you have those disparities. You have those things you have to overcome. One of the things you have to do is like inequality when it comes to resources, right? So when you're 20-something and you see this problem that needs to be solved, how do you solve it like how do you raise up you know the money for a giant building and physical infrastructure and things like that when you know you're not your dad's not a billionaire or a millionaire right um you use the tools around you what was the best tool i had the

internet so like that's what we started that's how we started we were like the one of the first remote non-profits stole it which is kind of weird when you think about how non-profits work because we stole the idea from the for-profit industry but people are like non-profits are still slow to move to that because like i guess the human condition is still trained to oh i need some place physical to feel like oh i'm giving my money to something that's actually there but i'm like you know the advantages that we've had over physical locations you know you just can't compare when you know you're thinking of like a physical location that's spending 1.3 million dollars to you know literally help like maybe 50 people. And we can do the same thing using five, 6,000, right?

So how did you get started? So at the beginning, did you just notice a lot of your friends, you know, who are, you know, finishing their term in the military were also having the same issues that you had had? And so you saw them kind of walking in your footsteps. Is that what sort of inspired it? Well, what inspired it was that there was a person who had died because he had took his own life. Because he was, you know, one of the things that was bothering him and was causing him trauma was the same thing that I was hearing,

that I heard when I came, you know, to be in the middle of the military. In regards to, you know, thank you for your service when I qualified. He was doing everything he could to retrain into the type of job that he had had while in the military which was a mechanic but the opportunity just wasn't there.

Out of despair, this young man took his life and um i was like what can i do to help this family because the way that things were set up they the va wasn't going to help this family bury him so i started fundraising for this family using technology raised 10 grand in like 27 hours and we were able to help this young man help his family and you know help them set money aside for his young daughter so that's how you know we did it um then people were looking at me like all right what else are you gonna do and mind you i think people don't understand that i'm like 26 27 at this time i'm'm stupid. I'm not like, I'm not Mark Zuckerberg levels. Like people make me out as a genius.

And I'm like, no, I wasn't there. I'm never there. I was never, I was never that guy. Like this is all accident. Uh, and I was like, Oh, what? Uh, I don't know what I'm going to do. Uh, so what am I going to do? And I was just thinking, I was like, well, one of the things that's the most impactful thing to me is gaining control and understanding of technology. So I want to be able to do more of that with other veterans, right? Teach veterans about, you know, help veterans get this skill set so that way they can do things and change the world moving forward. And so that's where that idea came from.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'm a firm believer of this idea that productivity is actually the root cause for a lot of other things. In other words, it's very difficult to make somebody happy or to make somebody wealthy or to make somebody really anything directly. And often if you look at the people who win the lottery and then they- They're still miserable.

Yeah, they're miserable. And then they also blow it all. I mean, you hear so many stories. It's almost like this schadenfreude. We like to sort of laugh or have a chuckle at that. But the reality is you can even just helicopter drop a bucket of what somebody wants and it just will not work. But productivity is that one thing that I think is the cornerstone for really everything else. Everything else is kind of

built around that. And so when you take somebody who's in the military, who's part of that system, and now they're not in that system anymore, think that that that that seems like one of the biggest identity shifts that you could you could really do it's one of the biggest identity shifts in humanity right now yeah well you know people you want to know that they are worth something right people want to know that they contribute people you know from relationships to the job you know people want to know that on some level they're part of something bigger and they're contributing positively to things. They don't want to be the exact opposite. Most people don't.

So when we were initially starting, we were thinking of it the old school way of doing things with like partners and stuff like that. But like I said, biggest caveat was the South. And I don't know if you guys understand about the South. We are like on average two to five years behind what like East Coast and West Coast is doing when it comes to tech. of tech so when like I had when when I was learning things from my New York colleagues I spent like six months in New York trying to bring down itself I was essentially speaking Greek to everybody like no one knew what I was talking about so I was having this problem in which I was involved in the community that was in 2008 and I'm in the future so like how do I help

people regardless of the constraints of region and how do I help people start moving start without their constraints of their communities and you know what they are like they are nuggets are you know the thing about veterans is because the military they you know we shuffled all over the place. So a guy who, like me, may be from the South, but now he's in Ohio. Or a guy in California may now be in Detroit or in Mississippi or something because of their military journey. So how do I help people and not let things like region, community, location, any of that stuff, like government, none of that stuff get in the way. And it was like the internet, right?

So the first thing we did was after doing the website was we started a Slack channel. Second thing we did was start a GitHub organization. And we just kept moving and moving on. Like, what do we need to do to start a nonprofit organization, a nonprofit remote company? What did WordPress do? What did Basecamp do? Those are our two biggest models that we use. We use Automatic and Basecamp because, as people people know Basecamp automatic they're two of the most

successful like 80 to 100 percent remote companies on the market right so that's something that I really strongly wanted to emulate I do not you know if you, DHH can create Ruby on Rails and, you know, create something that ruled programming for, you know, darn near a decade. And from his basement and from his home in Germany or Switzerland and then become like a Formula One driver in his spare time. I'm sure I can help veterans get their passion and skill up in programming, right? And, of course, it had a natural progression of us initially going into Ruby on Rails because we were like, hey, Ruby on Rails already was very remote work friendly. But the thing that was happening, particularly in the American markets, was that because co-schools were doing Ruby on Rails as well, and they, you know, code schools were more capitalistic. So they were just, you know, jamming out

these, quite frankly, subpar Rubyists. And they were saturating the market to the point where people were not hiring entry level Ruby on Rails developers, which helped us actually find, you know, we were looking at things. No, JS had just dropped like

a Drake album by this time and I was looking at how even though I was a professional Rails programmer at the time when I was getting contracts it was Rails and I was getting contracts and people were asking me more JavaScript

questions and Ruby on Rails questions because React was coming in and people liked using React with Rails. So I was like, well, I'm getting more and more questions even on these Ruby on Rails jobs about React and JavaScript than actually using Ruby or Rails. They don't even care about that stuff. Like, there's something here so i went to my team and i was like hey yo guys we're just gonna we're just gonna drop the whole ruby area it's too it's too hard to teach to people who are on windows machines uh we either got to get them to dual booted or it's just a nightmare right and you know it's just I get we get so busy having to teach the framework that it adds like six extra weeks.

Like, you know, you know, we were doing 18, 20 week courses because, you know, we had to teach framework as well as programming fundamentals because, you know, Ruby on Rails is magic. So you really can't, you know, it's what computer programming fundamentals are. And then, you know, when it comes to architecture and things like that design architecture then there's ruby on rails ruby on rails has a lot of stuff for you so you don't really have to care about yeah i mean they have all the scaffolding and they set up yeah plugins for the databases i mean it's it's awesome but it's uh it's a lot to learn at once. Not only that, it hinders you. Like when I was first starting, it was the big Ruby on Rails bootstrap Angular drive, right? And they did a lot of the heavy lifting for you

so you can make things. And what we noticed was that because of that, you were losing a lot of the little things that would make you in the long run like it was about more about productivity and getting you able to quickly do things to showcase to an employer so they take a chance to get a job versus taking the time and making sure you had fundamentals down and you were clean crisp and able to solve problems so that's one that like we teach mernstack and jamstack but that's like the last like six of the cohort, and we focus heavily on JavaScript the whole time.

The reason why we teach Mern is because we're able to focus heavily on JavaScript. In the same way, we don't do any CSS frameworks, none of that stuff, because I'm not so stickler for being a purist. I love CSS frameworks. They make the job so much easier. It's just that in here, you need to focus on, like, this is sparring, right? This is the boxing gym. You can't cut corners in here because you cut corners in here. You're going to get exposed in the ring, right?

Yeah, that makes sense. So that's how I approach it. What about, like, you know you know getting back to so now people kind of have an understanding of Vets Who Code so it's this service that you provide is it online or do people physically come to a classroom we are having our first IRL

cohort in Nashville it's terrifying this year but most because like it's the one thing I didn't want to do ever Comcast gave me 10 grand to do it I was like oh okay I guess I'm setting this up now so it's like now I'm doing all this work to make sure that Nashville has their own BWC cohort like all this going on like so that way if I like oh if I move I'm like okay uh you guys are i've done my you know good deed in community um

so yeah so we're doing that but most of our classes are online and we do that because you know it helps us find the type of troops and people it's more so like we don't want to confine people are willing to do the work because locale um one great example of that is we have a student named Andrew, an alumni, Andrew James. And he, when he first met me, I thought he was a troll. He reached out to him to get more information about Vetsu Code. And, you know, he needed someone to help mentor him, get him on his goals. And he was in Finland. And I was like, no, you're ISIS. Let me block you. So he hit me up on Twitter because he first hit me up on LinkedIn.

I was like, block. Then he hit me up on Twitter like, hey, no, I'm a real person. So it's like, you're lying. All right, let's get on to Google. Let's get on the chat. He was just asking you questions about aircraft you saw, things like that. Yeah. So we're on this google uh video chat and i'm like okay you're a real person you are you you're not trying to like like well you

don't ask for no secrets because i don't have them but he turned out like he had a very unique story he was he got a contract worker overseas in finland the love of his life, stayed years, about to marry her but his family his mom, dad were older they were sick, he wanted to come back home but he realized he didn't really have a quickly transferable skill to get a job when he came back to America

so this is about Sukhoi comes in and we're, while he's overseas in the middle of nowhere to me, right? Finland is probably awesome. But to me, it just sounds cold when I say the name. Yeah, I mean, if you're at the top of Finland, you're having a chilly time.

Yeah. He was telling us, like, you know, people put their, like, it's so cold that people just, they go through, like, a mini depression. But they also, like, put the babies out there during the coast so they can get acclimated to it quicker. Yes, I know. Right. When I was like, my parents,

my parents told me that in, in, um, in Italy where, where my parents are from, they would, um, they would throw babies in the water to get them acclimated to swimming.

I mean, of course they'd go catch them, but it's like, you'd be like one and a half, two years old. They just throw it in the water. Like, yo yo this is abuse in america this is child abuse yeah yeah i mean if i did that you know here they'd have me facing a wall you know well i know i don't don't don't do your italian relatives dude

so like we were going through this process of training him while there. And then he started doing the visa work for his significant other. And they ended up coming here. He ended up doing more training while here. He had to spend a few times, like, doing some apprenticeship stuff while going through that process. Ended up getting his first job as a senior software engineer in Dallas at Verizon. So we were like, holy crap. Like, yo, your first job and you're a senior software engineer in Dallas at Verizon. So we were like, holy crap. Like, yo, your first job and you're a senior?

I'm like, that was not my first job in tech. And that made me super happy because I was like, yo, my troops are getting jobs that are way bigger and cooler than my first job out the gate. Tell us about that. I mean, let's say, you know, so obviously there's going to be some employers where you show up, you say,

high school degree, time in the military, FET2 code, I have the skills, and they just say go home, right? There's going to be other people. That's the mis... I think that's being misconstrued. It's not just, hey, they're just the VWC troops. We focus on making sure they have the things to showcase their work.

Like, oh, their GitHubs are fleshed out. Their code pins are fleshed out. They're able to answer the questions intelligently. We are training them in programming fundamentals. There's a section of our cohort where they're just focusing on computer science by itself, right? And then they're building from week one all the way to week 16. And they, you know, from the gate, we focus on one language so we can focus more on fundamentals and paradigms that are in computer science versus jumping from language and language

framework to framework so that way they can get better and because program like you know i think uh hiring managers i mean facebook is one of them as a great example hiring managers are getting better and getting smarter and they're realizing the degree doesn't mean anything facebook apple microsoft they've all dropped the degree, the mandatory degree aspect of getting a job there. So they're learning that the things they do, like while it takes a unique level of aptitude to get to the level, that's just at that level, right? Those are the big three in the organization. That's the Thor captain america yeah no yeah obviously there's not there there's um i'm not saying that that companies as a whole do that but i'm saying you know there's

going to be someone out there some hiring manager out there who has that bias right and so one of the things i've noticed from just talking to a lot of people who want to sort of make this switch is that is that it's one of these things if you get it in your head it you can kind of make it it can kind of feel more real than it really is right and so I think a lot of it is about you know interviewing well and also but having sort of that confidence you know while the industry is kind of going through this transition because as you said you know it wasn't more than maybe five years ago they were having degrees as a requirement. Now they're not. How do we sort of give people the confidence?

I think you kind of hinted at this with, you know, building a really solid GitHub portfolio and things like that. But what do you sort of teach? Maybe it's the last lesson or something like that. But what do you teach at the end? It's I say this is how you walk into an interview and walk away with a job well see that's the thing we don't teach that at the end he said at the beginning because you know it goes back to discipline equals freedom right you know if you're anxious if you don't feel like you're you belong if you're you're going to fail if you don't do the work. And that's the secret, right? VWC, our Slack channel, is filled with people who are experts in the industry. Everywhere we have everyone from engineering managers at Google Cloud in there,

people from Facebook, Microsoft, there to help you. And our curriculum is designed around what it requires to build a production-level product in MernStack and Jamstack that these companies would be appreciative of. And we put you on production-level code. We go through that. So with people, I've always said, do the work. The confidence comes from doing the work. I like, because i'm a combat sport

fan i always go back to combat sports right you know mike tyson wasn't confident because you know he was buff he was confident because he had years and years of experience of knocking people out so he knew that he could do it like you see now were you a big fan of early ufc like ufc one yeah oh yeah it's unbelievable i mean i it's been a long time since i saw that but i remember watching some of those and you know there were no weight classes uh they didn't wear mouth guards there's basically no where to get elbow to the back of the head it's just insane back then and uh yeah mike tyson was insane it's just i don't know if we'll ever get back to like those, those days were just wild. Oh yeah.

Well, that's good. But going back to that analogy, when you think about the Gracies, they had the confidence to compete with that regardless, knowing that there was no, you know, there's, there was no protections because of literally generations of putting in the work so when it comes i i have a i fully believe that confidence is a byproduct of you know knowing knowing your stuff right so that's where that whole analogy comes from like if you're pushing code every day you're writing code every day you're studying you're if you are obsessing about this at least two to four hours a day, I try to tell them like, you know what, at least dedicate 25 minutes to this. Like every day, 25 minutes is a small price to pay for programming that you,

I mean, especially like in this current era, when it comes to JavaScript in general, it's, you know, this is the golden era of JavaScript education and tools. Like 80% of the best stuff out there is free. other upper echelon of that stuff and that isn't free I mean you they're always doing discount codes and sales on like, you know, and you know You have syntax so you can listen about JavaScript and things about the industry while driving when it comes to JavaScript You have guys like you guys doing programming throwdown getting you know tidbits like we're in the golden era of programming where people are just literally like you know looking all over the place and like to give you the tools you know like

hand deliver them to you almost when i started that wasn't you know still like kind of like the wild west kind of latest stuff going on well you know so i'm like you know there's no excuse like just do the work be willing to do the work take the bruises i said it's a skill so every day is a monday and some mondays suck so you have to understand that and you have to be able to you know put one foot forward in front the other. I understand your goal is to get simply 1% better versus trying, like you're not going to come up with a program every night, but 1% is different. It's going to change every time.

Look at it at that 1%. 1% changes incrementally from day to day. 1% today is going to be able to actually remember HTML, how to put HTML on there. Like, then tomorrow, your 1% is you're going to know the command and image with HTML on there. Like, you're not even going to think about it. 1% after that, it's not only you're going to be able to do all that, you're also going to know all the things you need to change for web accessibility purposes.

The 1% after that is not only going to be able to do that, you're going to be able to scaffold a style and see with as easy as you can So 1% changes that criminally if you're doing the work and that's where the confidence comes from And that's what I'm being able to you know Answer the questions and get the skills like you need for the interviews as well as you know like VWC We don't leave it just up to them and we connect them with a mentor. Like after block one, which ends tomorrow for them, we start assigning them mentors based upon their strengths and weaknesses, right? So that's one thing. Like, you know, Twitter is like a goldmine for being able to find mentors.

Being able to read people's journeys and see where they were 10 years from now like in the secret um sarah drasner she tells his story about how uh this uh art teacher this pottery teacher told two groups in the classroom that there's um that you'd be great at two ways whoever does one group can you have to do at least 50 pots um in order to get an a in other groups you have to give me a perfect pot but the problem was the ones who did the perfect who did the 50 pots turned out higher quality work than the people who were theorizing the whole time and just trying to get the one perfect pie so you have the same level code right you have to constantly build constantly show up constantly do things that you may not may not be your best work to get to your best work, right?

Yeah, there was this, I can't remember the gentleman who said this, but the idea was, so I think they talked about it in terms of art. They said if you have a really good eye for art, you know, you just are unnatural, then the first thing you draw is going to look so much worse to you than someone who doesn't have a good neck and actually patrick and i have talked about this i mean i'm i have no musical ability at all and i got this app where you could uh kind of just with your finger on the ipad kind of make different melodies and they all sound amazing to me and and i i wanted to send it to all my friends and i realized wait a minute i have zero talent it just looks amazing sounds amazing to me because i have zero talent right and the opposite is also true the people who are who have a really really good

eye and have a good passion for software engineering the first thing they write might really really disappoint them but that's where they have to realize sort of that that paradox exists they have to kind of push through and get better and better yeah like you know that's a secret the secret of like i mean confidence is you know how confidence is a skill like everything when it comes down to a lot of things that we experience are skills and the only way you get them is you build them. Like even with interviewing is a skill. You have to practice interviewing. That's one of the things we do at VWC. We let them practice interviewing.

We do mock interviews. We go, when I have my one-on-ones with people, I'm like, hey, I want to go through some mock interview drills. Like those who are still looking in the process of getting a job or they're looking to get a new job. Like, hey, okay, send me your resume. Let's see what's going on.

Let's, all right, let me look at your LinkedInin and things like that like that's where the whole mentorship aspect comes in like having someone that's gone that way helps you but you still gotta do the work right and that's how you grow and how you get better right so i just like said we have a saying at BWC called skills pay the bills. And that's how I look at it. It's like what you do. Betsy Code and coding is very similar in the idea that you get out what you put in. It's not the other way around. You know, you can't show up a few times and then expect someone giving you a $60,000 seventy thousand eight eighty thousand no you know what you um what you're willing to put in the work is what you're going

to get out people look at my trajectory and they think it's like you know super speed and like fast and like you gotta understand like for over a decade or like i guess i like to say half a decade because i don't count the first, especially at, you know, when I was at the department of home security is like legitimate programming because it was just database stuff. But I've been obsessing over this. So when I'm not working, if I'm not at work working and looking up solutions,

I'm at home looking up solutions for that suit code. I'm time boxing things. I'm teaching the things that I use at work. I'm applying the things I use at work to my nonprofit. I'm taking the same tools that I use at work. I find I love it. I'm coming out of the out of a billion dollar company and teaching rookies how to use these exact same tools on the level of that a billion dollar company does right so that's where that whole like that's the secret sauce like you know where one thing pays and helps the other right you know um the founders of ewc we all three of us work at really cool places i'm at cbs uh noel he's at usaa uh andrew is at usa Today. We come and we teach people things

and we know it works. This is what works at this level. This is what we're going to teach you. We used to teach some things that other people were doing and we're like, I'm never going to touch Canvas.

I've never touched Canvas on production level. I'm not going to teach it. You know, but we teach GraphQL because guess what? People are moving towards GraphQL on production level code. We teach React because people move towards that. We teach Firebase because Firebase works is a great way to, you know, use databases

without actually having to do database stuff. And it's very JavaScript oriented. So instead of using MongoDB, we use Firebase, right? It's just an easier way to do it. We focus on JavaScript and ES6. We focus on how to write, turn jQuery into JavaScript. We do things that, hey, you will have to do this on the job. Like, don't, I mean, if you go into a job where there's like a 10, 15-year-old code base,

you're going to be turning writing somebody's JavaScript out of somebody's jQuery. It's going to be poorly documented. One of our board members, Brian Holt, used to work at Reddit and Netflix, and I was just in-channel. I was like, hey, does anyone have any, like, really crappy CSS files that I can throw at the students so they can focus on debugging, cleaning up and trying to implement CSS for it and Flexbox into?

Because that's what you're going to have to do. You're going to have to find there's going to be some really old code base that needs something that's more modern installed into it for a new feature. And you're going to have to combat those code styles and things that have had a code defensively and things like that so you can you know make stuff work and he was like oh i think i can find some crappy thing that i was like prototyping once upon a time one of my old jobs but yes awesome find that let's go and do that that's the type of that's the style that i work on i'm like i we our lessons and our ideals come from real world experience right so it's like hey i have been in a situation where you are battling a 17 18 000 or 18 000 18 000 uh line of uh code base CSS and you're adding CSS grid and flex to it

but you're fighting a 18,000 line main CSS file over here so you're having to write code defensively just to do the work that you want to do, make it show up the way you want it to make it show up

so I try to put those lessons like when i experience something gives me pain i'm like let me if this does not spark joy let me make sure that it sparks joy with other people like that's my philosophy right that makes sense yeah like you know it's a you know investment code is like you know breadcrumbs to those where i'm willing to do the work right so yeah what about that's that's a, you know, a Vetsu code is like, you know, breadcrumbs to those where I'm willing to do the work. Right. So, yeah. What about, that's a really good point. So, I think, you know, in the case of Vetsu code, there are some veterans are very enthusiastic.

They, and you give them an amazing opportunity, right? What about, there's a lot of civvies. There's a lot of people who are students. There's a lot of people who Vets to code isn't the right thing for them um what uh you know what would you recommend to them as something that you know can you know it could be sort of a good proxy for vets who code for people who either aren't veterans or you know they they um you want to try something different i see that's tough because i try like i try to stay in my lane. So, like, first and foremost, like, everything that's going to come to me

is going to come from the point of view of a veteran who learned how to code and is a JavaScript developer. So it's really hard for me to give, like, advice like that for if you don't come from that. I can give you the tips and things that the – I wouldn't say tips, but these are basically literally things that I see that here's something that if you focus on, you'll be successful in the resources that I recommend to everyone all the time. First thing I always recommend is pick something that you're passionate about. In the end, the languages don't matter as much as if you're passionate about solving that problem. I don't know if I've been a programmer if it wasn't for Vetsu Code. I tell

people that all the time. If I wasn't trying to solve this problem, I don't know if I'd stay as motivated as I was. There was no one around motivating me to become a programmer. Like, I live in the South where programming is nowhere near the biggest industry. Like, in Nashville, it's getting there, especially with Amazon coming in and stuff like that. But where I was at when I was in Memphis, it wasn't something, particularly in minority communities, wasn't something that was being, like like shouted from the rooftops as an option right um so i have no idea like what would happen if i hadn't had something to work towards something for betterment when you're especially when you're with everybody who's around you that knows this or is um rooting you on is in new york or they're

in san francisco like it's really weird to like i tell people my biggest supporters are all either rooting you on is in New York or they're in San Francisco. Like it's really weird to like, I tell people my biggest supporters are all either in New York or San Francisco. I don't understand how this little Southern boy ended up getting fans in New York and San Francisco. Like it's cool. Like mama,

I made it. It's a beauty of the internet, right? Yeah. So, but that's the biggest thing find something you're passionate about like you know i chose javascript because i truly believe it is what i like to call the working man's tool is something that is not you know the speed of it and the ideals of it when

it was from when it was first created to now has made it really hard to be gated by universities because A, universities don't teach it, B, because it's more functional, the object-oriented. You really can't gate it with like a lot of CS fundamentals because it's functional programming. It's just as much creativity as it is logic. It's right there in every browser in the world, so you have direct access to it regardless of how crappy your computer is. You can have an old Windows box or the sleekest MacBook out there, and JavaScript is still going to work in the browser, right?

So that's why I chose JavaScript. You know, it just made everything that I wanted to do with everyone and every tool easier. And, you know, we're in the after the Node.js boom, you know, or, you know, like I say, the Drake makes tape drop. And it just exploded everywhere with React, Ember, Angular, Vue.js, Node, Express, Next, Gatsby. We have the Jamstack, we have Mernstack, we have Meanstack, we have Mervstack. Yeah, I think the beauty of JavaScript is

it's so easy to show somebody you just get a VPS and you can just easily go to someone and say hey, go to this URL and check out my cool website. It's not, you know, go to the Play Store you have to sign up for this

beta version of the app and then oh, I started it and it crashed. The deployment is something where you can immediately get some feedback. I think it's really important for people early on for them to show something to your mom and she says, wow, that's amazing. I can't believe you made that by yourself. I'm just trying to get that going. Like I said, the tools, you have CodePen, you have GitHub, you have Revolet.

Like these three tools are changing the game of like CS education in general. And, you know, they are just, they make it so much easier. They make it easy to showcase what you're doing. So I recommend those three tools to anyone on top of Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is getting better. I'm going to be intrigued to what happens with this new CEO shakeup that's going on. Because even I have been bitten by the inexperience bug of going to Stack Overflow and expecting people to love me and be happy. I don't know. There's something about Stack Overflow developers

and them hating everybody. I guess I'm drinking enough coffee. Maybe drink coffee black. I'm like, nah, I'm cool with that. This is true of almost every online community. There's always just like a cabal of veterans who are, not to overload the term veterans, but a cabal of people who have been in that community forever. And they're usually yeah i mean hostile is not the right word just like dismissive you know stack overflow is one of those where

you could submit a question and someone will just like kill your question they say oh it's it's too much opinion it's kind of like it's kind of like nimby but for tech yeah it's like nimby for tech it's like not in my backyard oh it's awesome that you can if you want to learn this question but not over here go play somewhere else little ricky so like i think it's an artifact of this this this this wave we're seeing where just everything you do is part of some democratic vote it's like you can't even just tell someone happy birthday without you know uh seeing like how many votes did I get? You know, how many whatever it is, how many hearts did I get on Twitter? Right.

And so as soon as you kind of put that on everything, I think you kind of create that atmosphere. Yeah, you create that dopamine hit. And so people are either afraid because they don't think they're smart enough to do it. So they avoid you altogether. Or you have these people who are always doing it because and they become the rock stars because they built that clout or credentials up right yeah but then that's also how you know when you do that the best idea usually doesn't doesn't always gravitate towards the top because it's more you've done it in a manner to where it's a popularity contest now versus, hey, let's try this thing.

Yeah, so you're absolutely right. So the Vets Who Code, so it's a nonprofit. It's distributed throughout the whole country or even maybe the whole world. World, yeah. Yeah, there's veterans all over the world. Yeah. all over the world. Are you sort of, are you like hiring for teachers or people to help with the website or what's that situation?

If there's someone, let's say just graduating college and they say, you know, I really want to help out this organization any way I can, what sort of a way that they can contribute? All right. So the way we do this is, first of all, it's a pro bono.

Like I said, I don't make any money over it. They gave me money, and then I put the money right back into the community. Like that's how I do things. Or I put the money in new resources. And we're about to grab two new companies as sponsors, technology sponsors. Literally, that's what happens they like i they gave me the funds and i spent a bunch of money to make sure infrastructure and stuff's going to be taken care of like the next five years for everyone and then we're adding up two new

projects now because i was like oh we have funds for it there you go bam done um how i like what we do the troops work on the products because so that way they can get confidence and you know experience and build a production level code um i started doing that when i was seeing that hey everything that i was building when it came to vwc was helping me and i'm kind of at a level where everyone already knows that i'm involved with bwc like i can't hide it i can't go on an interview and people not know that i'm involved with bwc right they google me oh there's you tell me more about this and like oh hey how you doing like this is awkward uh this is a crazy first date you stalking me already okay um so like when i was like you know what maybe i should let other people drive and like focus on the board like focus on the

combine board and make the issues and the tickets and do the mock-ups and then start then you know start forecasting more like when we two years ago started looking at you know i wanted to move into react with the trip with vwc's uh web app but i didn't want to add a complex back end and gas beat was just coming up and the rise of jam stack was just coming up and i was like this is what we should do and so i started putting the tickets and doing discovery for that and letting the troops drive that and within like i gave them a year to do it within three months they transferred the entire stack to um gatsby jamstack app right so and now what we're doing like we have this a new domain we just bought that's who dot codes right and we're going to turn that into a directory

and what's going to happen with that is our new troops that are in our alpha project our alpha team right now they are going through learning right now that's going to be their project you're going to be building you know that's who dot codes which is going to be a directory for everybody that's in the Vetsu code community. And then the Bravo team, we've already got their next phase of the project, which is going to be focusing on the job board portion of vetsu.co, right? And then we have right now, we have like, I don't know if you guys ever heard of the book, Team of Teams? No, I haven't. Yeah. I'm going to add this to my list General McChrystal

if you notice I read a lot of stuff from generals and stuff Iraq War I guess generals how they changed combat was really in a less violent way when you take

when you take away the violence it mimics a lot of agile and combat methodologies right so now we do a lot of things that are teams of teams right you know we have the leadership quote-unquote team which is the dumbest thing on earth because i'm like i tell you i'm the most unqualified leader here like i want to shoot breeze and drink beer the rest of you guys uh i don't want to be in charge why do i have to like what do i have to make roles like just stupid uh then uh but we have people basically the executive team and then executive team is a head of usually a head of their own team so we have the code pen team they handle all the code pen stuff um designs when we do things like special like you know we did a new year's uh

disco ball drop and yeah yeah they handle stuff like that got a ton of likes everybody loved it they shared it code pen loved it everybody was happy we got pick pin of the day it was awesome right um they you know they even put me on weird things like you know there's such a thing as a white castle valentine's you mean like the burger white castle yeah castle does a valentine's day dinner it's like has a cult following did not know that's awesome i know ikea does one that's the one i've heard of ikea does a valentine's day dinner they put me on to something brand new and i was like okay so this is real this is like you know this is not like some this is an april fools early like what's going on so okay like so that's things they do we have the product team they focus on keeping the product um basically

the web app cleaning, cleaning it up, fixing it, coming up with ideas. The, I handle the mock-ups for that. Um, I do all my mock-ups in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, because like you can design in a browser now. So there's no need for me to like, you know, open up a Photoshop file ever. Um, so I like that's what they do uh then we have um we have mentorship team that they focus on and then within the mentorship team there are two mentorship teams one is for you know current students and one is for alumni so we have continuing education mentorship team headed up by daniel pritchett and then we have a um troop mentorship team headed up by Daniel Pritchett. And then we have a troop mentorship team headed up by Mark Locklear. And what Mark handles, he focuses on mentors who are strong in JavaScript to be able to assign them to troops who are learning JavaScript.

While Daniel, he focuses on troops who have jobs. And then he lets them go, know understand next steps that it's okay to learn other languages like i'm like dad in the organization like no we're gonna stick to javascript just because that's what we're here for but daniel's mom and he's like no baby you can go learn go you can go you can do don't listen to him you can do whatever you want what about like people you know you might have a lot of uh i do like people in the military are always traveling right but there are definitely some people who especially when you think about veterans have sort of settled down and i know that you know a few times we've talked about how

you know all of the sort of programming energy seems to concentrate in a few places right um do you feel like that's going to change? Do you tell people to move to New York or San Francisco? What's your sort of feeling about that? How is that going to evolve? Oh, it's evolving now. It's super, like, there's another Drake analogy. What a time to be alive. Right.

Because it's already already already evolving. Like I said, everything's five years behind. And while now while New York and Silicon Valley is kind of getting cold on the coding buzz, you know, now the South and the Midwest are kind of like of like oh we want to be in on this because you know i like to say i'm a big combat fan i believe in the fighter analogy um and the best fighters live in boring places like albuquerque new mexico and stockton california make great mixed martial artists because there's nothing else yeah because there's nothing else to do there. You're either drinking or fighting. Same concept with programmers. Silicon Slopes or when you're going

to Utah, Utah Pluralsight's there. Brian Holt is from there. You go further north, Ontario, Hamilton, where there's nowhere, nothing to do, West Boston's from there. So the more boring the place,

the better the JavaScript developers are. Like, that's what I'm just, I'm learning that, like, the less there is to do, the better the talent. And, like, that's what's coming down here. Like, you know, right, I've gotten two opportunities to speak

at conferences with no CFP. They just like, yeah, we would love for you to come down. Well, okay, in Mississippi and Georgia. So I'm very happy to finally be able to speak in my backyard versus having to go either to New York or to California for speaking engagements. Although I do have one in Columbia, which is my first international speaking engagement.

It's going to be great. Oh, I thought you meant the college at first. No, no. I'm talking the country. Like, you know, it's going to be insane. Yeah, I think it's, you know, and Patrick and I have talked about this before, but, you know, I think the whole remote work revolution,

you know, we're just kind remote work revolution, you know, we're just kind of waiting for that to drop, you know, it's almost there because, you know, in the end, you know, we are one of the few jobs where you don't need to be in the room. And because we require, you know, you get rid of the book deep work and things like that, like how Gil Gates takes all the books he's going to read in the year and, you know,

sprites off into the woods and reads them like in solitude, which is if you like, yeah, that's a little too extreme. He's a billionaire. So I can't hate. That's not something right. Yeah.

You know, maybe here's something to going into the woods for a week with every book you're going to read and then coming out like all this knowledge. I don't know. Like, you know, he makes more money than me, so I can, i can you know i think it's i think it's a weird flex but okay but you know whatever um like that the idea of deep work being at home where you're already comfortable you're able to do that deep work with little to no you know interruption or maybe go to like a co-work space if you have to like i'm one of those people where like i am half and half where like i have to be cut off but i like don't have

to leave the house like i turn my dining room area into my like work my remote office when i'm at home because i'm like oh i don't invite people over like that anyway why do i need this big space and big table like i don't like people like that yeah i think it's like one of the like great sort of ironies of silicon valley is that you know we built the video conferencing as much as we you know have trouble with it and we make fun of it you know it gets better and better every year and now it's it's so powerful that you can call almost anyone. And yet, you know, everyone's trying to pile into a few cities. But, yeah, I think it will get better. Not only that, our tools are integrating remote work better. Like my favorite app, right, is Visual Studio Code.

Text editor. Super nice. Yeah. Their live share feature now has audio and chat so i don't we can literally just say you know what we're going to shut zoom down everybody go to this live share and we are going to talk and chat while pairing wait what is i don't know about this you can actually uh like stream yourself coding? Is that what this is?

Yes, everybody can jump on LiveShare and pair together while talking at the same time. Like, it's amazing. Like, it's like, I don't know. It's, I don't know. It's the best thing since peanut butter and jelly. Let's put it together. Patrick and I, we're going to have to go on Twitch. And maybe the three of us. The three of us are going us have to go on twitch and stream ourselves making something crazy it's the most like i absolutely

love it my like yo i just used it today and i was like man what a time to be alive like no no having to use skype or zoom at the same time or even if you're in slack right you can now from slack let's jump on a call. And you just press the call feature in Slack. And then, you know, there you are. Yeah, I'm calling Slack. Okay, this is nice. All right, now I have to fire up another app.

Like the app companies have decided, the services have, you know, like made it so that it's so much easier for us to integrate the idea of being human and human interaction into our work right because in the end that's what the thing was missing with being a programmer right because people tend to think especially the more collegiate style programmers they program for computers when the secret is we supposed to program for humans to understand programming not for the computer because the computer is going to compile and run it regardless so you might as well you know code for the person that's going to come after you right computer doesn't care yeah there's a saying that uh you know um if your code gets peer-reviewed which you know if you're on any sort of team that's

going to happen, then right off the bat, it's been read by twice as many people that have written it. So you wrote it, but two people have read it. And that's before it even goes into the repository. You know, chances are hundreds, maybe thousands of people are going to read it after that. Yeah. And, you know, that's the, you know, that's the secret sauce of programming, right? Programming for human interaction and not for the computer because computer doesn't care right um so but we did we not get off on like a crazy tangent we're talking about trying tips for like people that are in college i think you know i think you you had a really good point which was you know to find out you know sort of what your passion is. One of the ways that I've sort of discovered the things that I, um, are really passionate about is, is do I kind of, is it something that I can do till two in the morning and I'm still

kind of excited. I have to kind of force myself to go to bed. And there are things, uh, that, that, that bring that out of me, but they're not valuable. Like playing video games. I could easily play video games till four in the morning, but so can everyone else. And so I can't, that's of me, but they're not valuable. Like playing video games. I could easily play video games till four in the morning, but so can everyone else. And so I can't, that's not a skill that's really like marketable, right? But honestly, like solving puzzles. I don't know, esports, like they have,

the first high school esports team just opened up. The Air Force has an esports team now. And then there's a college, like colleges have esports teams i am also that one dude who cannot do more than like 30 40 minutes of gaming because if i do like i get bored like there's no video game it's gonna keep me up game for an hour i'm like hell i don't get it like my friends they make fun of me like i can't stay on a game for three four hours so i'm like you guys like when do you guys go outside like when do you guys go to movies like i'm a movie guy i'm a bruncher like i want to go like i have my instagram to do with food i don't know anything like like i'll go outside and like i want to eat at that cool new place or i

want to go to like Cheekwood, like, like understand my city. Oh, there's an Indian spot there. Indian before let's go there. I'm like, I'm a fat kid. Like I love cake. My parents are, are, are the same way. Like my parents love to just take me out when I was little on, on drives around the town. And I'd always think this is so dumb. Like we would just, we would just drive around the town looking i'd always think this is so dumb like we would just we would just drive around the town looking for a restaurant uh you know that we hadn't been to and and uh we lived in in uh

you know we also lived in the south and so we'd go to random cities we'd go to places that were like really out there in the boonies we'd eat at restaurants where people would look at us pretty weird because it's just these like like Italian people just kind of show up at like a biker bar. But my parents, that was their thing. They could just drive around looking at different restaurants and stuff. And that gave them a lot of energy. So a lot of people feel like they need to find that one thing, that one dream job or dream strength. But it really doesn't work that way. I think,

you know, you actually, any person out there has a lot of strengths, a lot of things that they could do that would that would be very fulfilling for them. And it's really just finding out like overlaying that on top of the market, because you have the market, you know, good, bad, it's not going to change. I'd love to live in a world where everyone spent you know 20k a year on art and they got 20k a year of value out of it and our artists could be doing great but the market is what it is like we can't change it right so so like look at the sort of things that you could bring to the table and look at the market and say is there you know where is that overlap where i could do the job that i would be doing for free but also make great money?

Yeah. I mean, going back to that analogy of loving video games, being able to build the games that you would love to play, that's where that – or fashion. I know so many people – I don't know if you guys ever heard of Ken Wheeler. Ken Wheeler is my favorite person. No, I haven't heard of him. Yeah, Ken, A, because Ken is like two steps to the left of crazy. Like it's my first favorite place. I don't know the reason.

But he has this really storied history of being a high school dropout and then going back and trying to go to college and trying to be a rapper and having all these things that he loved but like failed but found himself learning javascript and becoming really really good at it and now you know he's a developer expert and there's all these things but you would never believe that when you're right looking at his code this is some you know dude that one day wanted to be like eminem like for real like like you look like when you talk to him you're like oh yeah because i make fun of him like oh you know sunglasses you look a little bit like pitbull like it's kind of weird but you know it's just those are those are the things like you know i have a colleague uh she's really she was really big into fashion before she ended up getting into data science.

And it was that using, like, fashion and fashion trends that, you know, really helped her focus on that track of data science. So, like, you know, food, I think that helped me with design, like, and learning, like, color psychology and stuff. Because, you know, like, food, different foods, it was different vibrancies and, because you know like food different foods it was different vibrancies and like things like that like when you're talking about your parents uh try driving all over the place looking for restaurants is why you know you get to learn different things about your city just through the food like you know nashville is famous for its hot chicken right everybody talks about natural hot chicken people never talk about the fact that nashville is also famous for maxwell house coffee because that's my maxwell hot house is literally here uh i have a buddy from nashville who says uh the ribs

like you know i have a big fan of texas ribs and he just told me i can't be your friend anymore like he said natural ribs are magic he is lying like don't listen to him. You can't be his friend because he's lying to you. Oh, no, it's Memphis. Sorry, he said Memphis. Yeah, okay. Memphis ribs are the best. Yeah, Memphis ribs are, like, Memphis for ribs, Texas for pulled pork, South Carolina, just don't even go for the barbecue. It's weird. But, like, Nashville is also, we have a bar here.

Like, not a bar bar. It's a cotton candy bar because Nashville is the home of the creation of cotton candy. And, you know, like things like that, like, oh, man, it's such a huge thing to like feed your creative juices and like keep you going. Like that's like things for me to help me like learn more about UI and history. I'm like I'm all over the place when it comes to front-end development and how for me, food and cooking, this year has been this secret of focusing on food science for me, and I've been learning more about development and programming through cooking because focusing on serious eats and food lab and temperatures and like what

meat you could cook with this or if you're going pescatarian, what type of fish are best for this type of dish and vegetables and stuff like that and like mastery of having to make ramen and like... Do you post about this on your Twitter?

Do you post like some of your best recipes, things you've cooked? I am on the Instagram. Oh, Instagram, okay. Yeah, my personal Instagram is Captain America, my puppy, and my food. You would think I'm just a Captain America fan who has a dog who likes food. That's pretty much all that's on like my Instagram. So what about like people who want to know more about,

you know, about you, your experience, Vets Who Code, these kinds of things. How can people kind of reach out? Should they follow your Twitter? You know,

how would, how can people keep up to date with what's going on? I don't really tweet about VWC stuff and JavaScript on Twitter. So, at Jerome Hardaway on Twitter, at Betsy Code on Twitter, the Betsy Code website. I'm a pretty much open book when it comes to that on Twitter

as well. I love having conversations. When it comes to people that want to help, we have certain protocols. We try to make sure that people who are mentors, they have at least two years of experience in the industry, either in JavaScript or something else. And when it comes to people touching our product,

we kind of only need the product for the veterans because if you get a ticket, then it's going to keep a veteran from getting a ticket. Yeah, the best way to be part of that course is to build the next course, right? Or to build something and have it go in production. Every time a troop

builds something in production, a drill sergeant gets his wings. That's right. Maybe a drill sergeant loses his voice. Maybe we should do that one. But that's what people really want. Yeah, so those are like certain prerogatives, priorities,

but we're always looking for people who, you know, you fit that criteria, particularly in JavaScript, when it comes to ES6, things like that, pure JavaScript, the nuts and bolts. Like, we're always looking for people who have that experience. Very cool. Now that the podcast has been going for a while, we definitely

have folks who have been in their career for years. Obviously, there's people who even listen to us from the beginning who are career professionals. If any of you out there have a strong background in JavaScript, this is an amazing opportunity to sort of give back, right? And to, you know,

you can never underestimate sort of like how important it is to have reciprocity, right? I mean, every time you give something, you always get something back. So if you have that experience, definitely. Personally, I'm absolutely terrible at building websites. I'll be honest. I think it's an amazing skill to have sort of that ability to kind of lay everything out kind of in your mind. You know, also the whole that full stack client server, all of that. But I think if you're out there and you have that skill, this is just a really amazing opportunity. You know, hit up Jerome on Twitter

and tell him, you know, hey, I want to be a mentor. You know, I want to try and help out. And, you know, I want to teach the next generation. And I think in that way, you could really contribute. Raj, yeah, that's the best way. We're always looking for people

who are willing to help the next generation of veterans learn JavaScript. It's like you said that, you know, giving back gives, you know, when you teach, you become a better, you become better at what you're teaching and, you know, for that person that's learning that helps them build their confidence. Like that's where the whole, you know, I matter come from. Like someone's, you know, someone's investing in me and then, you know,

veterans are weird like that. Like they need to know that people are investing in me and you know veterans are weird like that like they need to know that people are investing in them and depending on them for them to like you know like get serious like i think it's coming from the military where you're accustomed to dealing with that stress of like having the world on your shoulders like oh yes like if you mess up at work the missiles don't go down or people don't come back home. Hey, it's the reality of the beast, right? I have a buddy who was in the military, and he was saying he set up Microsoft Exchange, the email servers.

He set them up on FOBs, on Forward Operating Bases. Yeah, FOBS. FOBS, yeah. And he said – I asked him what it was like, and he said, well, just imagine, you know, trying to set up someone's email, but there's bombs landing. It's like, wow.

It's like all these things. The way he said it, it was very short, but it really kind of created sort of cognitive distance, like put everything in perspective, you know. Yeah, we were, one of my exes, we were going through a first aid course together. But I already went through like a combat lifesaver course like years ago. And I was just flying through it and doing well.

And she was mad at me about it. Because like we just wanted to go through this CPR first aid thing because my nieces and nephews are coming over. Spending a week with me. Oh, my goodness. Like the military did not train me for that. So I was making fun of her. And I was like everything you can do i can do a boss dropping over dropping over me and she was like just shut up jerome i was like oh okay i'm shut up now so uh you know that's awesome so yeah there patrick's laughing

oh man that's awesome well thank you so much for for your time this is absolutely amazing um i really i know there's a lot of strong javascript developers who listen to the show i really encourage all of y'all to reach out to jerome um let us know if if if uh um if you had any other questions for him or anything like that and we tried to cover all the ones that came our way. But you could also just reach out to Jerome directly. He's very accessible. Yeah, I like giving the tools and things. I'm going on a journey right now called JavaScript De-Fatigue

because there's so many resources out there that you can learn from. So I am going to focus on one year, only this one resource and only the resources that are recommended from this one resource. And I am documenting my skills based upon that. Like, hey, I'm only doing one thing and the only things that come from this thing.

And I'm going to tell you guys my experience from that so like you know especially with javascript developers i love javascript developers like people are looking to get into javascript like tweet me i'll send you like i'll let you know what stuff you need to but oh focus on this don't focus on that learn this don't learn that it's cool like especially front ends love front ends front ends. So if you're wanting to, like, I feel like there's no more rewarding industry than front end development, because in the end, no matter how intricate the back end is, or how big the data set is, or how detailed the data set is, you know, people aren't going to care if it doesn't look pretty, right? Like, that's just how people are.

Like, Facebook is one of the most like you know when you look at the machine learning and stuff that goes on like it's insane but didn't get there because machine learning got there because people liked the experience ahead with the app right so because that's how in the end people have to like things and people haven't want to look at it right same way with any you know clothes cars anything else that's the web so like it's like you know you're always going you're the it's like being a gate guard or elite gate guard in the military you're the first line of defense you're the first thing that the peak that the person is going to see and like so you have to you have to bring it because your job how would

you were how well you will be doing your job depends on the how hard the other guys have to work right so like you know yeah i mean you can you can have a bad first impression and say well that and that that was really unfortunate but then the next day you're meeting somebody else but if you have a bad website, your whole company could be gone. Oh, yeah. I recently found a website that was so bad, I almost volunteered to do the site for her. Because I loved her Instagram, the product she was selling. I loved her Instagram.

I was like, yo, I'm going to buy some of this for my lady because she's going to love this stuff. I went to the website and said, I'm not putting my credit card in this this was like that bad name on Spongebob not going to do that alright well thank you so much for coming on the show it's at Jerome Hardaway

does Vets Who Code have a Twitter or is that the same one at Vets Who Code have a Twitter or is that the same one? At Vets Who Code. Cool. The website is VetsWhoCode.io, GitHub repo and GitHub organizations, Vets Who Code. We're starting two new projects that the troops are going

to start working on. So if you're looking for hiring troops, just check out or people for speaking in organizations or anything opportunities, anything, you'll be looking at the vetswho.codes. That's going to be one project we're rolling out and then we're rolling out our vetswho.code.github.io

so that way people will be able to keep up with projects and things that we're doing in the organization without having to look at GitHub. We have a lot of things rolling and coming down the pipeline. Very exciting.. We have a lot of things rolling and coming down the pipeline. So very exciting. Very cool. Cool.

Thanks a lot. And thanks, everyone, for subscribing on Patreon, subscribing on Audible, using our Audible link to get that. I hope you really enjoyed this interview. I definitely did. I learned a ton about JavaScript. I learned a lot about military service and what that's like. Thank you again

for coming on the show, Jerome. Thank you all for listening. Catch you next month. Thank you guys for having me. The intro music is Axo by Binar Pilot. Programming Throwdown is distributed under a Creative Commons

Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license. You're free to share, copy, distribute, transmit the work, to remix, adapt the work, but you must provide attribution to Patrick and I and sharealike in kind.