Skip to main content

A Day in the Life

Now that I've moved back to Greenville from Pittsburgh, many people have been asking me "what brought you down here", "what are you doing now?", etc. To which I answer "I'm doing a three month development bootcamp for front end engineering at The Iron Yard..."

<insert blank, confused stares here>

Often, a further series of questions continues from there:
Bootcamp? It's something for the military?
What kind of engineering is that?
What's an iron yard?
Or my personal favorite - "oh...ok?"

So, I thought I'd do a post to take anyone who's interested through what all of that translates to.

This is where I arrive to in the morning. This is the NEXT Innovation Center - the building where The Iron Yard is located (correct, it's a company, not some sort of metal/sod hybrid - but more on them in a second). NEXT is a very neat space in Greenville geared towards housing tech-minded, innovative, and entrepreneurial companies in the area. Check them out here.


Then the festivities at The Iron Yard begin. The Iron Yard is a rapidly expanding company who specializes in a few things:
  • Running an academy (i.e. bootcamp) for training in web development and mobile development. 
  • Operating a co-working space, which is essentially a shared office environment that multiple people who aren't necessarily associated with the same company can use (think self-employed, small startup, home business, etc.)
  • Running a startup accelerator that provides working space, mentorship, seed money, etc. for entrepreneurs looking to take their ideas from zero to Fortune 500.




Every Monday through Thursday morning, this is where you'll find me. From 9am to noon-ish, we are in this room for lecture from Mason Stewart, the CTO/head instructor here. In this room, we learn (pretty simple). But more importantly, in this room we learn HOW TO LEARN. Knowing how to expand on our knowledge, discover new information, and deepen our skillset after we're outside these walls is much more important than anything we'll learn in them.



The rest of my time is spent in this room - Monday through Friday from noon-ish to sometime in the evening, and Saturday and Sunday as needed. This is where we work on our assignments for the day, night, and the time that we used to use for a silly thing called "sleep". It's awesome being able to work in a big, open, collaborative space. Questions fly, people help each other, and spontaneous conversations and inspiration are a constant. Plus, there's a gigantic, mustachioed Stormtrooper on the wall - so, there's that.



This is my desk - where the magic happens (translation: this is the epoch of significant frustrations, triumphs, and ah-ha moments). In case you're wondering, no, that's not a television on the corner. It is actually a monitor - 28 inches, 1920x1200 resolution, it's fantastic. If I had the money when I first got it 5 years ago, I would have bought 4 of them - and unfortunately, they don't produce them anymore #SadFace.



Hopefully, this gives a better idea of what I'm doing during the day/night/weekend. It's a tremendous privilege and blessing that I get to be in this space every day, doing what I get to do for the next three months!


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review of the New Macbook

I finally got a chance to give the new MacBook a whirl and decided to share my thoughts about it. I very rarely feel compelled to review products or services. Like the average consumer, I typically only review things when they’re so fantastic that I think they’re a real game-changer or, conversely, when they’re so terrible that I think it’s very likely they’ll be a game-ender. Unfortunately, this review will be the latter - let’s begin:

The Big Question Admittedly, I was skeptical about the new MacBook from the get-go. Despite my skepticism, I really do like to give everything a fair chance, so I tried to keep as open of a mind as possible. Rather than focusing on any specific feature of the MacBook and making an uninformed decision about whether or not I would like it, I instead simply pondered the question “who is this designed for?” Unfortunately, after spending some time with it in person, I’m no closer to answering that question.

And that really is the big question - the only on…
2 comments
Read more

MailSnail Series

Starting in August of 2015, I began building a company called MailSnail with my friend and co-founder, Matt Bertino. To follow along with my personal thoughts on the ins and outs of the company, experiences, lessons learned, technical details, etc., please check out the posts below. I’ll continue to add new posts here as I publish them.

Post 1: Starting a Company
Post 2: Building a Product
Post 3: Launching a Product
2 comments
Read more

Building a Product

This is the second post in a series I’m writing about a company I’m starting up (or have started, depending on when you’re reading this). You can read other posts in the series here.
As I’ve talked about here, I’m starting a company called MailSnail. In this post, I want to share the ins and outs of how we’ve built the product (i.e. the actual web application).

The Buzzwords I’ve tried my hardest to make this post as approachable as I possibly can for anybody and everybody. I don’t want this to be something that is only interesting to folks who know what HTTP stands for or can rattle off it’s associated status codes. So for my non-tech readers, please bare with me for this one section and keep on reading.

For my fellow tech-nerds, I figured you might not care so much about the minute implementation details but rather are just more interested in a list of all of the pieces of our tech-stack (because you already know the implications of each in their use). So here’s the quick and dirty …
2 comments
Read more