I was lucky.

I found Dev Bootcamp after flunking out of university. I guess that was a choice. I had grown increasingly afraid of my classes. They stressed me out. Sitting in lectures was torture. The reading seemed pointless. My professors didn't have time to for my unread, meandering questions. My TAs didn't want to spend all of the lab entertaining my musings, either.

I guess you could interpret all that as selfish monopolization of shared resources — TAs and professors have limited time to spend with their share of ~15,000 students; they're not tutors, after all. So maybe it's a good thing I fucked off.

I managed to finagle myself some independent studies, but these were even less nurturing than I had hoped, and I came out of them only marginally better at the subjects. My independent study sponsors were very critical, but not very constructive, and with no input into the process, they were more-or-less guilt-tripped into giving me a barely passing grade, and a vague sense that my efforts were mediocre — but not, crucially, how.

I have spent my entire conscious life dreaming up software products. It probably started as games, but I am a very connected guy — read, web-addicted Millennial — and the Tetris Effect knows no deontological divide. While I was flunking out of university, I was filling grid-paper notebooks with colored boxes. Uninterpretable, colored-pencil, overlapping, concentric or con-something else.

Some of these were UIs, and some of them were data models. I didn't know the difference, really. I didn't know anything about any of these. I didn't know those words.

I didn't have a major at university. I took introductory classes. Anthropology. Astronomy. Afromusicology. Robotics. Philosophy. I thought I wanted to be a writer. I still do!

But people don't read novels. This was 2010. The next great American novel was gonna be an app.

So that's what I wanted to do.

A friend of mine came home from school in Montreal, disenchanted.

"They're not real artists," he told me. "They're just concerned with their grades. There's no scene! They're not doing real work!"

I don't know how true that was, but he and I liked Silicon Valley. There was a scene, here. People were doing real work. They were bluffing. They were failing. But they were trying.

We agreed to start a company on the ride home from an early Quora meetup. We wanted to build an app to build the artists' scene he hadn't found in Montreal. Something to get people out to freaky little early-stage artistic efforts. And something to reward the artists.

We had no product sensibilities. We imported a Canadian software engineer, and he taught me how to install Hadoop. This is a good joke, if you're paying attention: at this point, I've only read one book on Python, and hadn't even yet written my first program. Hadoop is a non-trivial big-date-crunching ecosystem, a tool for reliable, scalable and sophisticated analysis of large data sets across disparate computing clusters.

We had no users. No designs. No business model, and three old PC towers in my friend's father's garage.

We had a startup fetish, and no mentoring. It took us more than a year to fail, by which time we'd thrown one (1) party, hashed out one (1) mockup, pitched one (1) investor and let slack two (2) academic careers.

Oh, but I learned to stay away from Hadoop, which is something.

So what the fuck was I supposed to do next? Go back to school for computer science? Sit alone at my mother's kitchen table reading SICP? None of that seemed the alacritous route from zero-to-CTO I was seeking.

Enter Dev Bootcamp.

(This story ends badly, by the way. Five years later, I am not CTO.)

I had heard about it from a friend with a real CS degree, who now has a read CS job at a real CS company.

It took me two tries to get in. They rejected my first application. I think they only let me in the second time because I offered to pay all $10,000 upfront. Did I mention I saved a lot of my [grand]parents' money by flunking out of public university? That's a weird way to put it, huh?

Dev Bootcamp was a phenomenal experience. I never felt so hot, so capable, so brainy, or like I was learning SO DAMN MUCH! I was psyched to get in early, psyched to stay late! I was flooded by a barrage of unassailable concepts, but among them were countless grokkable models to wrap my hungry head around. I started saying things like "you don't have to understand everything to be learning maximally", and imagining that drowning might not be such a bad way to die.

Sometimes, it was easy. And I got to play. My pair and I would finish an exercise, and I'd say, "hey, wait; before we go on, what if we tried to go further?" or "what if we tried that first step like this, or like this, or like this!?"

Maybe I just like having a pair — a captive audience for my japes, as well as a library of unknown unknowns who could only explain things at a basic level: my level!

I didn't know the exercises we were going through were trivial.

I sat on a couch all afternoon with giant Jenga blocks, trying to explain iteration, sorting and searching to a smiling, comfortably bewildered cohort. It was like magic: I was grokking beautiful immaterial things in a room full of crazy, ambitious people.

None of them were techies. Doctors, lawyers, hippies, mothers, just wandering, wondering people desperate to learn the secret art!

Leave no one behind, we promised ourselves. Our reputations are only as good as our peers'.

They made us cry. They brought in a shrink to walk us through interpersonal communication exercises. They had us sit in groups, every week, to talk about how we felt, what we were learning, how we were struggling. We cried! We embraced! We joked about recursion!

Our instructors were mad geniuses! They exposed themselves. They knew too much. They'd cover any topic. They'd go far afield. So long as we finished our SQL milestones, they'd sit at the whiteboard and explain absolutely anything. They were real people.

"There are two kinds of people," our instructor told us, one day. He pantomimed an intensely focused person hunched over a keyboard. He became exasperated. He threw his hands in the air, and stood up. "That kind, and then this kind."

He pantomimed another intensely focused person, hunched over a keyboard. He became exasperated. He threw his hands in the air. He lay his palms in his lap, closed his eyes, and drew a long, meditative breathe, then whipped around, and again began to energetically strike at his pantomime keyboard.

He stood up, finishing "only one of these people is a programmer."

They taught us yoga. My father loved this. "They're teaching you things I wish they'd covered in my classes."

He's an old-school Java programmer. Never taught me a thing. Didn't want to be like his father: controlling, forcing him to learn software to help the family business.

"It took me years in professional environments to learn these communication skills, the importance of health, of empathy," my father told me, when I got out. "They're really setting you up to avoid all the worst things about working in software."

He stopped bothering me about going back to school, after that.

Instead, I got a job writing software at an international business services firm, and Dev Bootcamp sent me a bottle of champagne.

I put a date on my calendar for three years after I was hired. "Quit Your Job," it said.
When that date came, I quit my job. I have been freelancing ever since, and I've never been lonelier.