Coding Saves Lives.

Coding saved my life. And it could save your life too. I don't just mean pull you out financially for your family, because it's a skill that is always in demand. Yes, even with AI, coding could save your life if you constantly do bad habits like video games or you're in a rut, or if you see yourself as a loser. Let me tell you my story of how coding saved my life. So to paint a picture, it's 2017. I'm sitting there hungover, playing Madden, and I've been teaching English for way too long, and I see myself as this loser. I hit rock bottom. I was on an app called Meetup, and I typed coding to the search bar. I went to the first meetup that I saw, and that meetup was at a coding boot camp. I went to that meetup and I got one of the flyers for the coding bootcamp. So I'm sitting there playing Madden and hungover, and in the corner of my eye, I see that flyer. I see a phone number. So I call the phone number and they tell me to come by. So I go talk and they tell me the price. And it was expensive. It was three months intensive and three months of projects. And during those three months, I learned a lot. I learned JavaScript, PHP, MySQL and HTML and CSS. It was really fun and I learned a lot. But I was not the smartest in the class. I might have even been the dumbest. But okay, if you look at one of my past videos, I talk about why that's okay to be the dumbest one in the room. Anyways, I wasn't the fastest, I wasn't the quickest, I wasn't the brightest, but I was diligent. I was diligent and I had integrity. If I told everyone I was going to go and finish it at home or figure it out, I would go home and I'd figure it out to the best of my ability and I'd try my hardest. I went to the boot camp and I did projects there. And after the boot camp, I was given an opportunity to work at a startup. And it wasn't a funded startup or anything. It was, you know, it was bootstrapped and it was fun. And that CEO, through his network, he was able to find an angel investor. And that angel investor, it's not like all these people are like super rich or super loaded or anything, but he basically said, how much do you guys need to live? So, you know, it wasn't very much money. I was living on, like Ramen and Water at that time, not even bottled waters, like, like tap water and free waters from Starbucks. I was able to be around programmers and build things that, you know, we'd show to the angel investor, we'd show at these pitches. And through there, I learned teamwork, learned discipline, learned how to learn, which I think was the most important skill. Learning how to learn allowed me to take a problem and really figure out anything if I put my mind to it. So if you are good at video games, you can get good at programming. After that startup, I worked at many other companies, startups, and we built many cool things. I built many cool things with different teams like screen sharing, app journaling, app blockchains, e commerce and social networking apps, and IoT products and other ones if I can just think about them as well. But it was very rewarding to build all those apps, to actually see people using it in the database and see people, you know, purchase things and see people actually posting things. And it was really rewarding to actually see that in front of my eyes with the things I've built. During an interview, like, a person would interview me and be like, what are your goals? I'll always answer with like, you know, if I'm on a train or I'm on a bus or public transportation and I see someone using that app, actually it's really rewarding because I can really think that I built that or I helped build it. So I always want to build an app that's gonna have a lot of users that I can. I don't have to like, put in their face like, oh, I built that. But it would just make me feel good to know that I helped on building that software. Working at these companies, I was able to teach a lot of junior developers as well, and interns. One of those people was able to actually financially free his dad because of the job I gave him, so I thought that was very rewarding.