The Perils of Self-Taught Learning: A Journey of Trial and Error

When it comes to learning how to code, many people assume that they can simply put on their headphones and start teaching themselves. However, this approach often proves to be woefully inadequate. As someone who has spent years navigating the complex world of coding, I can attest to the importance of seeking guidance from others. In fact, joining communities and talking to other developers was a crucial part of my own learning journey.

One of the biggest surprises for me was the amount of toxic behavior that lurked in certain online communities. It wasn't until someone mentioned it in a Discord channel that I realized just how damaging these environments could be. This experience taught me the value of seeking out supportive and inclusive communities, where people are willing to share their knowledge and offer guidance.

Motivation is also a crucial aspect of the learning process. Many new programmers assume that motivation will strike them at some point, but in reality, it's often just as important to build discipline. Instead of trying to knock it out of the park every day, it's essential to focus on making progress, one small step at a time. This approach may not be as glamorous, but it's often the most effective way to learn.

One of the most common questions I get asked is "Am I too old to learn to code?" The answer, without a doubt, is no. I learned to code when I was in my mid-30s, and since then, I've had the opportunity to work with some incredible developers who have shared their knowledge and experience with me. In fact, there are countless examples of people learning to code in their 50s, 60s, and beyond, and going on to land high-paying jobs at top tech companies.

Of course, this assumes that you're willing to make a commitment to learning and growing. The idea that once you've started down the path of becoming a programmer, there's no turning back, is simply not true. Many programmers choose to continue learning and expanding their skills throughout their careers, often with great success.

In fact, having knowledge of coding and programming principles can be incredibly valuable in many different areas of life. From understanding how machines work to grasping the nuances of human behavior, knowing how to code can open doors to new career opportunities and experiences that might otherwise have been closed off.

As I look back on my own journey, I'm struck by just how much it has shaped me as a person. Leaving behind the world of professional music was not easy – in fact, it was one of the most difficult decisions I've ever had to make. But it was also an opportunity for growth and exploration, and one that ultimately led me to where I am today.

So what's the key to successfully navigating this journey? For my part, I believe it comes down to being honest with yourself about your abilities and limitations. It's okay to not understand something at first – in fact, it's often a sign that you're ready to learn more. Rather than trying to force yourself into a particular mindset or approach, focus on building the discipline of making progress, one small step at a time.

Ultimately, learning to code is just like climbing a hill. You get to the top and look around, only to see another hill in the distance that's even bigger and more daunting. But rather than trying to climb all the way up this new hill before looking back down at the one you've already conquered, focus on taking it one step at a time. And who knows? You might just find yourself enjoying the journey almost as much as the destination.

As I prepare to close out this article, I want to express my gratitude to everyone involved in making it possible. From sharing your experiences and insights with me to being part of the incredible community that makes up the world of programming, every single one of you has contributed to something truly special.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to the free Cod Camp podcast I'm Quincy Larsson teacher and founder of freeco camp.org each week I'm bringing you Insight from developers entrepreneurs ERS and ambitious people who are getting into Tech this week we're talking with Jessica Wilkins she's an orchestral musician turned small business owner turned software developer Jessica welcome to the show well hello good morning afternoon or evening everyone it's good to be here yeah it it's such a thrill to have you here because you're one of the people that makes Freo Camp possible you've been doing curriculum development and before that you've been doing a lot of tutorials that you've created around uh programming and uh database technology like all these different tools that developers use maybe you could start by just talking a little bit about what you do with free Cod camp and what excites you about it yeah I uh my journey with free cab started back in 2020 as a learner just going through the certifications and then I started writing articles um mainly about my journey and about beginner uh like HTML and CSS and JavaScript Concepts and then I started writing a little bit more um and I've written tons of articles on like Python and SQL and then uh recently I've been working on the JavaScript curriculum we just released a major update and so now uh it's a whole Project based curriculum over 21 projects that you can go through and learn JavaScript and so we're really happy about that because that's been a long time in the making and so now we're in the beta phase and so we're taking feedback from uh people going through the JavaScript curriculum and incorporating that feedback and updating it which is is one of the great things that I love about free C Camp is that uh people feel like their voices are heard it's an open source project and so if you feel like there's an issue or improvements we will actually incorporate that feedback we won't just be like no that's fine we're just going to keep it as is like we're very receptive to uh different feedback that Learners have because it's for the community there we're going to help build it out and and make it even better uh so that's what I've been doing in the recent days is just going through coming through Forum posts and Discord and seeing what people have to say as they're going through the projects and just kind of helping people out so you'll you'll probably see me a lot on the Forum and you're like is she just like live on that forum and I promise I I do like sleep occasionally there I do sleep and stuff like that but it does seem like I'm always on the Forum just like answering questions and just helping people out wherever I can but that's mainly what I've been working on the the past few months is the JavaScript curriculum there yeah and you were a prolific Forum contributor you were like super active on the Forum way back in like uh 2020 2021 like like a long time ago that was where I kind of discovered like who is this woman and why is she so helpful like what in what compels her to go out and help so many people in the community and maybe you could talk about uh your trans your transition into Tech and like how you ended up on the free Cod Camp forum and and maybe we can go back even farther and you could talk a little bit about just just growing up and uh you know your Early Childhood out there in California I I don't know if I mentioned this but Jessica is joining us from Sunny Los Angeles yeah I'm actually happy cuz it was raining last week and it wasn't so sunny and I was like this is not what I signed up for like I signed up for California exactly so I was like what is this like come on it's so I'm happy it's actually like sunny outside but uh but yeah so my my early life there um so I was actually born in Las Vegas uh Nevada and I was adopted at Birth by my mom and so she was a single mom and uh she wanted children and wasn't married so she went down the adoption route um and so it basically I was raised by my mom and my grandmother um and occasionally my uncle would help out as well and so uh they adopted me from Las Vegas she had a friend that was living out there and so she stayed with her cuz I guess the adoption process like it's like weeks you know it's like months on end but then once things like get rolling and she's been approved then uh it still took I think she spent like 6 weeks or seven weeks uh before I was born just staying in Las Vegas over the summer um because she was a teacher and so she had Summers off and so she stayed with her friend and then I was born and then they had to do last minute things before she could actually take me home and so it's like this long complicated process which I guess is a good thing like you know I guess it needs to be that way because you got to check everybody out and all that um but but yeah and so um we finally went home and we actually spent the first few years in Los Angeles living with my grandmother um and so my grandmother had a a duplex and so my grandmother lived on the first floor and then we lived on the second floor there and so the first six years of my life I lived in Los Angeles and uh went to school out here um all the way up until about like first grade and then my mom had a job offer in Palm Springs and she already had a condo out in Palm Springs and she would uh visit occasionally and so once she got the job offer she picked up and moved and uh started teaching out in Palm Springs and I spent the rest of my childhood uh out in in Palm Springs which for those of you who aren't familiar with Palm Springs now it's like completely different the last time I was there was like a couple of years ago and they're trying to make it this like tourist destination if you are familiar with like Coachella festival where all the like U music stars and stuff like that hang out so they're trying to bring more festivals and they're trying to being more events and a younger crowd but when I was growing up it was definitely an older crowd and it was where a lot of retirees would go and they would have like second or third homes there so it was a very different landscape than what it is now but it's a very quiet town it's a small town um it's about 2 hours south of Los Angeles um and so it was a it was a nice uh little town to kind of grow up in nice you know close Nick family and Community there um and so you got to know uh people pretty well uh but I started learning uh I started getting into music at 7 because my grandmother had this old piano that like my mom actually used to play on it's a whiter and we still have iter piano so it's like a regular uh piano it's like I think the brand is called warer I don't know if they still even make this type of piano but it's like a really old worls where I think of like the uh the electric piano like the road style it's a roads piano but with bite right right yeah you actually had like a I guess before they made the iconic electric piano they made uh or technically Electro mechanical piano uh they they made just traditional like it was just like an upright or something like that yeah yeah so it's like a small little piano which we still have to this day I it's now with me but like uh my my grandmother had it and then my mom took piano lessons for like a few months and then got bored with it and then my grandmother just held on to it all these years and so by the time I came along I was always just kind of intrigued by the piano and just you know just playing around on it and my grandma's like oh she really takes to that maybe we should get her some lessons and my mom's like okay cool and so we were moving to Palm Springs she's like do you want to just take the piano with you and she's like yeah sure I guess and so we had moved from the condo to the house there and um and so she signed me up for piano lessons and that was kind of the beginning of my musical Journey was playing piano so I have like weekly piano lessons for like 30 minutes uh with this really nice woman named Vicki and um I would go over to her house and she would have the little piano book on the stand and give me homework and then I remember at the end she would always uh have like this table full of candy and these like small little toys that you probably get at like the dollar store and so when you did a good job you could take a piece of candy and like a little toy with you and I was like that's so cool yeah and so yeah it was pretty awesome hey this is Quincy from the future just a quick note that during this podcast we spend the first hour talking about Los Angeles music industry and how Jessica was able to gradually climb the ranks and start getting jobs with orchestras and with big companies like Disney if you don't care that much about music and you just want to jump straight to the software development part we have a link in the video description SLP podcast show notes that you can click to jump straight there cheers so how long uh how long were you doing piano lessons before you got into your your I guess main instrument uh which is of course the ELO yeah so I studied piano from a seven and I officially I get stopped around 17 but I started the OBO at 11: and so I um in California they have a lot of Elementary music programs they're kind of scattered about and different states are a little more hardcore into their music education like the state you're in is a way more hardcore uh generally speaking um into its music education um and then California kind of just varies between area to area and so I was fortunate up that they did actually have an elementary music program and so fourth grade uh so I was 9 years old at this point they taught us recorders um we'd have like a weekly class and then fifth grade we had little fifth grade band and so we would have um weekly classes and we only got to pick like five lesson or five instruments and it was like flute clarinet saxophone trumpet I think trone was one of them and then percussion but percussion quote unquote was like here's a drum pad you know it wasn't like oh we're going to teach you Tiffany it's like no you're 10 we're going to teach you like you know drum pad and give you a pair of sticks yeah yeah and so then maybe stick one kid on like bass drum or something um and so I picked Trump fit and I hated it I was like really bad at it I didn't take any trumpet lessons outside of the class and I just didn't really like it but I stuck with it for the whole year and um when it came time to leave Elementary School go to middle school I still wanted to play You Know music and be with my friends but I was like I am not sticking with this trumpet thing I sound terrible I hate it and so what am I supposed to play because I was still playing piano but like you can't play piano in band with the exception of like jazz band and so I was like what am I supposed to do and so my mom had taught at the middle school that I was about to go to and she's like well I'll talk to the band director and we'll see what we could do there and so I met with him after class and he was like okay I hear that you're interested in joining band with us next year but you don't know what to play yet and he's like you know maybe he'll try the OBO and I was like I have no clue what that is you know it's not exactly like super common and he like went and grabbed an instrument and grabbed a read like put it together for me and like told me basically kind of how to make at least one note on it um and he's like okay here's a you know here's how you form your amateure and like here's how you blow and like just go for it and I made some sort of sound he's like great you're our new opal player I was like okay cool wow I was like okay sure cuz I'm like 11 so you know you probably went homeo uh I don't mean but you probably went home and looked at that OBO and put it look at the case and you're just like I mean did you feel daunted like you're going to be playing OBO in band and the musical director's you know initiation was literally putting the OBO in your mouth and seeing if you could even make a note right yeah yeah cuz yeah I was just like okay and then apparently there was like there was one other girl that had been playing for at least a year at that point and so we were going to be in the same class and we ended up being in the same grade um all the way up through through high school there um but uh but yeah so it was pretty much just the two of us and so those first like few months he was just trying to figure out how do I tame this thing cuz it's just very like it could be very wild um if you don't really know what you're doing and it could be kind of loud and stuff like that so my mom signed me up for lessons there was this really nice woman named Lynn who had lived close by or close-ish um that we can get to and um and so I had weekly lessons with her starting off with like I think it started off with 30 minutes and then we bumped it up to like 45 minutes in an hour as I started to build up my stamina um as I got older and so it was great working with her because she was super passionate into the OBO she was never a professional oboist she was a early music school teacher but she was always into the OBO and would go to festivals and stuff like that um and so it was great because that passion and interest in it like you know rubbed off on me and I was like this seems kind of cool and so she would expose me to my first few like OBO recordings and uh like who here are the you know prominent OBO people in the community I was like oh that's so cool maybe I get to meet some of them one day and um so yeah then she started talking about uh like different types of music festivals I could do and so as I started getting older and I progressed from 6th grade to seventh grade Etc I started looking at my first few summer festivals and that's where you spend like a couple of weeks literally just playing and Performing and rehearsing all day and so my first uh festivals were in Idol wild uh which is about like a 45-minute drive from pal Springs and it's up in the mountains and like it's this it's not just for music it's for all Arts disciplines uh but it was great just kind of being with other people and like just making music and so I started um just playing OBO and I also picked up clarinet because I wanted to be in the marching band but I never really put that much interest in declar so I got like good enough to kind of just like you know along and so I didn't really put that much time into it I could have like gotten a little bit better with clarette but with OBO I really took to it and by the time I was 15 I was like I want to be a professional oboist like that's what I want to do so I started getting really you made up your mind pretty early on like yeah yeah you you specialized and I I'm curious what that career path looked like because I didn't mention this earlier but you essentially ascended to like among the highest ranks of OB I guess like on national television and stuff playing the elbow uh and I'm I'm curious what that progression looks like for uh getting into I guess the orchestral industry uh yeah so 15 you make up your mind I'm going to be an oboist uh which I think when I was 15 I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life I was really into writing but that was about it yeah I just like really took to it and I think at you're like trying to just figure things out and then of course like guidance counselors are talking to you like what are you going to do for college like I don't know and like I was never like super super awesome in school like I did like fine with classes and I was always like super ambitious where I would try to take extra classes like AP classes which are advanced placement classes in in the states there um but I was never like super into like hard Sciences or math and stuff I was always into music and so that seemed like The Logical career choice and so at that point I had switched from learning from with Lynn I started studying with a professional obos uh named Fred and he kind of took me to a whole new level and and exposed me to so much more and started telling me about what it's actually like to be a professional oboist and that was so valuable to me uh because he just opened up this whole other world and he really was the one to kind of introduce me to like okay kid here's how this really works and so uh if you're interested in becoming a professional musician within the orchestral or Opera space typically you do have to start as young as like 10 or 11 or in some of these areas as young as like four or five or six or something like that if you don't want me asking like you you said building up the stamina I guess to play the ELO it takes physical stamina whereas playing the piano like I mean you you could probably play the piano all day with a little bit of practice cuz you're you're just making movements with your hands and stuff but you're not actually using your lung and like I don't know why is it that you have to start so young if you want to really reach the upper echelons of uh you know classical music yeah yeah I think the short answer is unfortunately just the competition and the the standard that is set like because when you go into an orchestral audition um the basic process is that most people have been playing for like 10 to 12 viewers so that's usually who you're going up against and um not everybody's invited to the inperson audition so sometimes they'll have a what's called a pre-screening round um sometimes they'll filter you out based on a school which isn't always great because there's great players everywhere but sometimes they are that selective I've been in situations where uh they will only go to certain schools and hold auditions uh so it's unfortunate that they're kind of gatekeeping like that but you know it it does happen um and so if you do like get to an interview then there's this whole list like 30 to 40 orchestral excerpts that you just have to know perfectly and if you make a mistake you're out and so they're like looking for you to make a mistake because they're inviting like 60 70 80 people to this audition and that first round they're just getting rid of most of you and so if you make a mistake you make their lives easier because it's like oh okay cool we just got rid of another person and so you go through like multiple rounds of auditions and it's that competitive and my teacher used to always told me like you you should be able to wake up in the middle of the night and I should be able to say all right play this piece play this play this and you should play it perfectly out of dead asleep and that's how you know you know it I was like okay cool yeah I I'm trying to think about like even the simple you know baselines I play like if I if somebody stood me up and said play this Baseline you know without any mistakes cold like that would be extremely difficult for me and of course I I picked up the Basse like age 40 or something like I played it when I was a kid a little bit in bands and stuff but I wasn't serious about it but um I'm just trying to like understand the level that you need to be able to perform at and you know like the psychological hurdles and all that practice that goes into being in front of the judges and basically getting zero leeway like what you said they're actually hoping that you fail because that makes their job easier so they don't have to make hard decisions between you know a whole bunch of perfect you know performances or something like that or near perfect performances um and also just thinking about like you said 80 or 90 kids that are trying to uh get into you know like essentially advance up the ranks within this this system um and it's it's very much like kind of a tournament system like what we call tournament in economic uh models and stuff where like many will enter few will win uh and it's not that like people win it to varying degrees like software engineering like there are 30 million developers in the world some of them are junior devs some of them are uh you know individual contributors like some of them are senior devs and then some go on to be CTO or head of engineering or just to uh create their own prominent open source project or create their own tool or something like that or found a company like any number of different things you can do and yet in obol land it seems like if you don't like perform at a certain level like you're I mean how many shots on go do you get you know uh as as a kid trying to climb up maybe you could talk a little bit about that like you were obviously able to jump through the hoops and get there get to the the higher echelons if if I'm using the correct terms but there were probably a lot of people who worked really hard who didn't yeah it's just like it it's really crazy competitive and like when you're like a kid when you're in like middle school or high school age like young you know teenage age then you start doing like honor band auditions that's where everybody within the district or sometimes you'll do like Oto like State band and that's like everybody in the state and California is a pretty big state so that's a pretty tough competition there um so you start yeah yeah so you start like doing stuff like that and you get a taste early on about competition and so you see all these and usually they put you in like a like at least for the middle school high school level it's a little bit different when you're going for college but when you're at the middle school high school level and you're auditioning for like State Orchestra or State uh uh band there then they'll put you all in one room room and so you literally are in your room like this this loud room with everybody so talk about like psychological mind games where you're hearing everybody that plays your same instrument and they're playing the exact same audition material you're like okay don't psych yourself out you just do your own thing but you're hearing literally your competition in one room and then yeah exactly so you got to have like nerves and steel and so you go through that process a few times and you kind of learn how to to deal with that early on um and that kind of helps prepare you for the college auditions that you end up going on and it's not the college audition is a little bit different where you don't have to have those large rooms usually there's smaller rooms but you're still in a room with other people that you're competing with so it's still intimidating because especially for OBO a lot of these Studios will only like they'll have uh at least with opo it's usually for college maybe 30 to 40 or 50 depending on the school and the popularity and stuff like that um but most OBO studios are a little bit smaller so they're probably accepting like two people so if like 40 people show up then like two people get in they're not going to accept like 20 people in their OBO studio all at once um and so for my situation I had applied to I think it was a total was it I think five schools or six schools somewhere around five or six schools somewhere around there and um all across the country I didn't apply anywhere outside of the the states there and so I applied for all the the big or some of the bigger schools like Eastman School music um Northwestern and then some of the smaller schools like University of Las Vegas and I learned pretty quickly that like to get an edge you have to take a lesson with the teacher beforehand to like develop a relationship with them and then the following year you come back and audition for them yeah yeah so like you have to like learn that stuff or just know that stuff or someone has to like tell you that stuff and so if you don't know that going in unfortunately you're might be at a disadvantage because somebody that's taken lessons or has gone to their music festival might have a better rapport with them and then you're just going in cold I mean you can still you know win wi out and get into their Studio but you might be at a disadvantage because someone else has already been working with them and they kind of have a little bit of like up so there's a lot of that going on too where you just have to like know stuff or like know people who know stuff that will tell you that um so it's an interesting kind of world uh that that goes on there so it's not enough to play perfectly to some extent there will be other people who perform the piece and perfect of course is like I don't mean exactly perfectly there are always going to be extremely minor variations between performance at a high level I would imagine but um it it to to some extent it is who you know and like your relationships that you've established with them and probably a whole lot of other considerations on top of being really good at OBO right yeah yeah exactly and so it's it sometimes kind of favors of cuz OBO is not a cheap instrument um and so if you're listening to this and you have kids and you're like I want to start my kid on the OBO like that's great but you there is a financial component to that so unfortunately it does like favor those that are in a different socioeconomic whether you're a middle class or or higher uh to afford the lessons the reads the maintenance and so it's it differs from other uh instruments unfortunately so you have to be prepared for that as well 1,700 bucks is what uh is what uh this orchestral Place website that came up in Google is saying just for a starter and then if you want like a professional L it's like $6,000 or more um oh for you know how frequently do you have to replace the reads um so reads like I would usually go through reads um I would probably go through like six or like when I was a kid six or seven like a week and then as a professional since I was making them at my at that point that I would go through them quicker so sometimes you play literally just a concert on a read and it's like okay that's done and so cuz it's like two pieces of cane like tied together and so they they don't really like last forever and it's not like it disintegrates or anything it's just like it doesn't have like that same you know you want a read that you can really go for it so if you're doing like a heavy intensive concert uh that Read's going to it's going to take it yeah I mean to contrast that like like you know uh you made your own reads uh when I yeah I started in high school and then by the time I got into college it was pretty much a requirement that we were making our own reads and a lot of us were still beginner read makers we were not really professionals or very few of us were actually professionals like at that stage but yeah we it was a requirement that we had to make our own there yeah that's such such an interesting like like the Spartans having to weave their own mat that they're going to lie on you know it's just kind of one of those rights of passages I guess making your own reads um yeah I mean just to compare and contrast like $6,000 for a starter instrument like I play on this this Fender this Fender precision base pbase and I think I spent like $600 and I spent like you know 15 bucks on flat W strings and you never change them and that's like all the gear you need like like I just plug into this little base Cube that I paid $300 for so less than $1,000 I have basically the top like like tons of musicians play on the P Bas you know sting Jamerson like like all the uh not all of them but a lot of Bas players just use this gear and it's so inexpensive and uh it costs basically nothing to maintain and I compare that to like the amount of Maintenance you're probably having to do on an elbow and then um yeah and it sounds it sounds like a a big hurdle for you know a family with a lot of kids like you come home from school you're like hey can I play oh it sounds like because you're your grandma was already really into music that your family was pretty receptive to that and they were uh willing to encourage you and uh provide lessons and stuff like that so you know thank goodness they did because you've built an entire career out of that a first career um and I'd be very interested in talking about like more about OBO and your progression in there but I do want to get to your sheet music business uh maybe you could taper in that direction as you talk about like your progress as a musician yeah yeah so at this point I was 17 years old applying for colleges and there was one school I really wanted to go to which is Eastman School of Music in Rochester New York because every single person I talked to had one thing to say they were like Richard Kilmer he's amazing if you get to study with him like you are just golden and all of his students I've worked with so every single person I talked to kept mentioning his name and I was like who is this guy and I looked him up and I was like wow this guy's pretty cool and so I just wanted to meet him and I was hoping to get a lesson with him but Rochester is obviously far away from H California Rochester New York yeah yeah this is like a six or 7,000 miles this is basically as far as two points can be and still be in the continental US exactly yeah and so I unfortunately was never able to get a lesson and I was bummed because everybody said like oh you're not going to get in if you don't get a like if you're going to have to like go out there In audition in person and so I was talking with my mom and she was looking at all these schools she's like look we got to be practical I don't know if I can get you we could get to these East Coast Schools because I had also applied for Northwestern um and so she was just looking at the practicality she's like I don't think we could swing this um is there any way you could do auditions like regionally and luckily they they did have a few Regional auditions for both Northwestern and um uh eastmen and so they had a both in Angeles which was great that's obviously much closer and my grandmother was out there and so we could just stay with her and they had them um I believe it was both at one was at Walt Disney's concert Center Walt Disney Hall in Downtown LA and then the other was at curn right to it place by the way uh I've been there it's it's amazing uh oh yeah in Los Angeles there are a lot of really famous uh what are they called like basically spaces where music is played um yeah yeah so it's a nice little area around there yeah what's what's the word for that um the act so there's a concert halls and there's a few reito halls around there yeah that whole like block right there is just really nice and they've been doing they've been building it out recently but uh but yeah that that whole block right there um and so that's where I had uh a couple of my auditions and they were Regional auditions and so for the regional ones uh the teachers that I was auditioning for actually weren't there they sent out people from Admissions and they had a video camera and they set up a video camera and they were like okay go through your audition pieces and at the college level there's a little more leeway you could still make mistakes to a point uh because you're still kind of a kid but then you get to the professional level it's like no that's not going to happen so at the there was still luckily some leeway and forgiveness because you're still kind of considered an amateur at that point um and so my audition for eastan like started off well but then I started making mistakes and then and I I felt really bad after it I was like oh I blew my shot and I didn't even get to meet him so I was just convinced that I wasn't going to make it and I was really surprised when I got the phone call in after school math tutoring that I like actually got in I was like wait what are they did they call the right person is this like I had to like replay the message and it was uh someone from admissions they're like hey I just wanted to congratulate you and getting into Eastman I was like whoa okay yeah W so maybe what you performed before you started making mistakes was so well done that they they thought that uh you know maybe it's just nerves or something like that um that's great congratulations on getting into Eastman uh a school which I frankly don't know a whole lot about I know about like U and I know about like Berkeley some of uh some of the more um I guess like mainstream like well-known music schools but Eastman so what does that mean does that mean you move out there to yeah so that yeah so then the next question was well the cost tuition and moving out to Rochester um and so I and at that point it was crazy how like life works out where I had gotten an acceptance into UNLV which is University of uh Las Vegas norn Las Vegas yeah yeah and then I got like rejections from USC Northwestern like it was like uh also Arizona State so it was just like rejection after rejection I'm like okay well it doesn't look like anything else is going to work out there just a Qui note I just want to correct myself first of all I said the population of California was 30 million it's 39 million and UNLV does not stand for University of Northern Las Vegas University of Nevada at Las Vegas okay lasas I just don't want people to walk around with bad information and by the way I said earlier un that stands for University of North Texas it's pretty close to where I live here in Plano um sorry please continue I hope that didn't do I just I don't want to be you know putting misinformation out there and have somebody confidently say oh you know and like quote me and be wrong so please continue no worries yeah yeah and so um so I kept receiving rejection after rejection after rejection I was like okay well I'm clearly not going to get into like Eastman because I received three rejections in a row and so I that point I thought okay I'm going to University of Las Vegas and U that's obviously Closer by to we were at um so I was already mentally getting in the mindset and I really like the teacher in the studio and so I was like okay this could be cool there and then when I got the call um I was like oh my gosh okay cool I actually like got in and then it became a question of like how do we pay for this because Eastman's not exactly cheap um I have no clue what they charge now but it's not exactly uh cheap there and it Eastman's part of the University of Rochester um and so Eastman is just the the music school there uh but since I clearly wasn't in state I didn't get any you know instate uh you know discounts or anything like that um and so I was fortunate enough to get some scholarships and so that helped out a lot then my mom helped out a lot and then I did take out some student loans um but thankfully it wasn't too many cuz that could have been way worse if I didn't get like scholarships and if my mom hadn't helped out especially with like the dorms and stuff like that um so we were able to make it work once the scholarship money came in and I was like all right I guess we're moving to Rochester New York I can imagine I mean it's a typical kind of private research institution uh $46,000 per year with that's tuition and fees um yeah I mean there's a lot of freaking money that's like approaching what you know like a median income for like a household or something in America so right right yeah yeah that I can imagine that that the scholarships were probably a big help there um so you were able to convince your family like this isn't crazy we can make this work so maybe you can walk us through what it was like to arrive in a polar opposite part of the United States and at this pretty competitive you know institution that uh is going to have you going really deep on music and especially on OBO because you what was what was your major were you like musical composition music performance yeah music performance yeah okay and so uh music performance in OBO uh specialty there and um I my people kept ask me like oh are you going to do music education but my mom always told me like don't go into public school education unless you like really really want to um because I think a lot of that came from like she felt like she just kind of had to um and she came from a different period so probably part of that was was true there weren't a lot of options uh yeah as a as a woman I would imagine like like in terms of careers there were kind of the accepted career paths that uh women went into and teacher was one that I mean to this day like I'm thinking about the school that my kids go to I think virtually every person that's teaching there is a woman uh I think there might be one or two male teachers on the entire staff so that was kind of presumptive for me to uh just jump to you know her being a woman in the 1970s 1980s as the reason why she went into education and not into a feel like software engineering but maybe you could elaborate a little on it yeah I I think that she definitely came from a different generation where there weren't a whole like it was an interesting landscape and change for women going into the workforce and what kind of available jobs that they did have um and I think at the time teaching was one of the you know quote unquote acceptable jobs or uh jobs that were more available and so you start looking at Tech and Tech was obviously a very different landscape in the 70s and ' 80s than it was uh obviously today especially with uh you know the internet uh and I think if she was just born maybe maybe if she were a millennial and born in a different generation I think she' be really good as a programmer because she has degrees in math and and always enjoyed Math and Science and it does actually like computers um and but I think that just was never an option for her and I don't even know what kind of computer science programs look back looked like back then and so that just wasn't a thing but I think if she was just born in a different generation and was encouraged to program she would actually be a really good programmer and I could see her doing really well and crafting a really good career for herself and she would probably work maybe in like the backend um I I don't know if she would really enjoy like the front end space but I can see her really enjoying like the backend space and and doing really well in that but she was just born at a a different time and options were kind of different like she she had a very interesting uh career where she uh was actually a flight attendant for a while um during like the tww panm era um and so none of those flight none of those companies exist anymore U but it was a very different time and like flight attendance that was like that was a pretty good career uh back then and so uh she worked as a flight attendant she sold textbooks for a while and then she kind of bounced back and forth between teaching and finally landed on teaching towards the end of her her 20s there so she kind of like I don't want to say like she like hated teaching she loved the students but like it wasn't her career choice she just kind of that was something that she did and she did it for like 30 plus years um and so she always told me like don't go like if you want to get a music education degree like get it because you want to and you want to become a band director and so I decided to stick with music performance and when we flew out there so this is now summer of uh 2009 um I graduated from high school uh came back from a major trip um and because my high school band took like all these crazy trips everywhere um and so we came back from the trip and then we was like okay we got to pack and go to uh Rochester and so we flew out there we had a couple of suitcases and uh that was pretty much and my of course my oo and we got there and that's when we started the orientation and so I started meeting people and my roommate didn't show up uh until I think like the next day cuz she was coming from China she was coming from Beijing uh she was a Pianist and um so I just had the room to myself that first day um just as I got like acclimated but that whole day was kind of a whirlwind because of course you go through like all of these like orientation and all these meetings and all that you're try to do these like tours at the campus cuz this I had never seen the campus in person so I was like oh this is what it looks like I mean that's that's pretty wild pulling the trigger on like that that kind of like decision without ever visiting the campus but it's it's a lot of resources to fly out to New York just to see the campus that you've already kind of made up your mind that you're going to attend right right right yeah unfortunately we weren't able to like get out there and do a trip beforehand uh we weren't able to audition out there so that was like the first time I had ever stepped foot into Rochester and seeing East for for the first time and it's this like Grand building and they were still working on the they were re uh uh updating the Eastman theater so I wasn't able to even go in there um until they were finished uh but then it was really cool just like like just soaking it all in and they throw so much information your way so I I didn't remember half of what they told me so you go through all these orientation and meetings and safety meetings and all this other stuff um and then I got checked in with the dorms and I put you know we put our stuff away and my mom was being a typical mom of like folding up my clothes and putting them in the drawers and stuff like that and then we had a quick meal together and then we got back to the dorms um and she said okay well I'm going to go back to the hotel and then I'm going to fly out tomorrow I was like okay like okay wow I mean you you'd lived with your mom like obviously you went out to the mountains for these like musical Retreats and stuff like that so you'd spend some time away from her but had you ever done anything on that order of like just being apart from her for an entire semester or however long you were away yeah this was like the first time I would have been away from her for like months and months on end and so it was like an awkward goodbye and I was like okay I'll see you later it's not like she was going to be down the street where I could just like drive cuz some of my friends they could drive down the week you know for the weekend to go visit and like that wasn't really like I didn't even go down for Thanksgiving because it was just too quick of a turnaround and so I only visited during Christmas and then of course the the Summers when I came back um so it' be months on end without like seeing her in person um so it was kind of was kind of crazy when she like left and it was just me and I had to start making some friends there and so slowly but surely uh started meeting of other people from the OBO studio and then I finally met the man himself uh Richard kilber who is the OBO professor and still is the OBO Professor to this day uh well into his like late 80s but he's still teaching there uh and so I got to beat him and he was so happy I had talked to him on the phone before I got there U and we talked for like an hour and he just went through everything I was going to basically do that first year and he was so excited and happy and he was telling me about the other oist that were going to be there and he's just that type of person and so when he met me he's like oh you're Jessica oh my gosh I'm so excited and then we're GNA have this is going to be a great four years for you and I was like this is cool okay like I wasn't expecting that um but he's just like that type of guy he's just he loves the he loves to teach he's just like happy about life um and so I was really excited and he's like oh have you met the other oboist there and then let let me meet meet introduce you to so and so and so he was like introducing me to all of these people and just giving me the lowdown um and then we had like a a a studio dinner I think most of the studio OBO Studio was there that was about like 18 or so people which is actually larger uh that's a larger Studio than most uh most studios are around like uh seven to 10 um but uh just because of his reputation and and whatnot his he was able to build out a larger studio um but most studios are typically around seven to 10 people so 18 people kind low uh student teacher ratio in in a sense like I mean how many hours a week were you just did you have oneon-one or was it seminar how how are you learning with uh so the way that it's yeah so the way it's structured uh for all the music uh performance Majors is that you do have weekly lessons it's it's for an hour and then you have what is called Studio class and so that's where the entire Studio meets um and then you just talk about the different pedagogy you do uh what are called mock auditions where you just go through a pretend audition and your teacher grades you it gives you feedback um and then you also get up there and you play what you've been working on whether it's a recital piece or orchestral excerpts or whatever you're doing at that moment and your teacher gives you feedack back in front of the other students and so it's more like a a Master Class Type situation so everybody gets to learn from each other uh so that first year he didn't he always left the Freshman playing in the studio class last and so he would have the seniors play first or I think it was yeah seniors uh Juniors uh uh sophomores and then freshmen and then grad students uh so each week like he would break it up into like these different themed classes there and then at the end of the semester we always did mock auditions which were always like those were the toughest ones cuz he was so strict about it because he wanted to prepare us for the realities of a professional audition which are very strict and have very high standards and so uh he had very high standards um because he was like look I just want to prepare you for like this is what you signed up for um and so like we always joke that like Studio class would always be an extra hour like longer because the we would get through the mock auditions and basically the way that auditions work is that a lot of them are done behind a screen to keep it quote unquote more fair um and sometimes it is and they tell women not to wear like high heels and stuff to give away that that you're a woman um and so you want to keep it as neutral as possible yeah so you keep like you're supposed to wear like quiet shoes and stuff like that um and uh so they try to keep it as like fair and neutral to remove any type of bias um I guess as best as possible so they have the screen in front of you between the the judges um and the uh actual performer there and so uh we emulated that uh imitated that for the actual mock auditions and so he told us beforehand what we were playing and we were and they were all like excerpts that we were familiar with that we've been playing for a long time so there were no like surprises so like oh play this random one we're like I've never heard that piece so we were all like prepared but the other side of that is like I this better be perfect cuz you should be prepared so there's no excuses you can't just be like I've never heard of that um so he had like a really high standard so we would go in one after another um and just play through the the excerpts and we wouldn't say anything and then we would just walk out um and just one after another and so like that would be for about an hour or so and then he would spend the next hour just grilling us on like every single mistake that we made wow so he's taking notes the whole time like like uh your your articulation is off on this particular thing thing or you know you're supposed to play softly and you're playing slightly too loud or I I mean I'm just kind of like guessing the type of feedback that he might be giving oh yeah that it was that detailed like he I remember there was one time where he uh like he started off he was like okay well we we there was a and though he would tell us who would move on to the next round and so he always had expectations that everybody would move on to the re round but then like if we didn't meet like the standard then we wouldn't move on so he wouldn't say who and until you got to your private lesson but he would say okay out of the like 18 of you that you know went through I would have only pass Six and I was like oh gosh and so I knew that he was like not happy with that because he wanted all 18 of us um and so then he would go into this whole hour and be like okay in measure one from the D natural to FP some of you that f is way too high that was like 15 cents sharp like I don't know what you guys are doing that needs to be true okay like I'm trying to think of how many herts of a difference that is but it's not many it's not many but like when I tune my Basse like if it's within like five or 10 you know cents I'm like cool good enough you yeah like he would just be like that strict he's like guys this is a major I don't know why you're playing that sharp like you know it's a major third I don't know why you thought it was a good idea and so he would just go that nitpicky and he'd be like yeah and then this phrase right here some of you are just I don't know what you're doing phrasing it like this you know it's supposed to be like this and so he would be that detailed and then in your private lessons he would go into even more detail and so no one wanted the lesson like if you had your lesson the next day you're like oh gosh okay like like because if you did badly you were going to hear about it and then if you did well then it was like okay it's a good day um it's so you never wanted to have the lesson the day after mock auditions if you could help it there but uh but yeah but otherwise like he was he always had a high standard for us but then you could tell he really cared about us and and just wanted wanted us to like succeed and he knew what that world was all about there um and so we always had his support we could always just ask him whatever or if we needed extra help and with like chamber music and stuff like that he was always there for us so we were really fortunate to to to have that situation yeah that sounds like an amazing learning experience I mean you're learning from a literal Master of the instrument uh who has at this point five plus six Decades of you know performance experience so he can you know come and Incredibly hold you to the highest standards uh because he probably holds himself to extremely high standards and he probably you know notes imperfections in his playing as well uh that he's he's probably still working on it I would imagine like you know uh there's the term woodshedding where people just go off into the woodshed and practice you know until they're like up to their own standards and then they go out there and they they they discover new standards that are even higher than their own standards right uh yeah having done that for decades I can only imagine what that was like and how beneficial it was to your playing to be uh with somebody like that and I'm trying to think of like programming parallels to that uh you know maybe pair programming with you know an extremely experienced developer or something like that but uh it's just not part of the developer education experience to my knowledge like unless you're going to an extremely like like you know top tier engineering school I can't imagine a situation where um you would get that kind of like extremely nuanced and granular feedback it it might exist I didn't get a computer science degree I guess neither did you uh so I don't know that there aren't these extremely tight seminar type courses but I think with music performance You could argue that it's not as subjective as code in the sense that there are so many different ways you can Implement something but when you're looking at sheat music I mean could you argue that there is a one correct way to play it and then there are more expressive ways and stuff like that but in general like if you joining an orchestra hypothetically we we'll talk about the kind of career progression of professional musicians uh but if you were going to an our um an audition would they value you taking creative liberties with the music or do they want you to play it exactly as it is on the page yeah that's the thing about like when you're studying music you have to know when you can have certain Liberties and then when you can't um so if you're going to play something by like Mozart you need to play it in Mozart style so you can't just be like you know adding in like oh I'm going to play it like a more modern 20 or 21st century style it's like no it's still msart it's so you still have to have like that right style right there so when you get to uh like when you're playing through like the mozar Certo there's always a cadenza and a cadenza um in movements is basically like a place where the orchestra stops playing and it's just you playing and it's something that you have made of and so even though you get to make it up you still like it's still got to be in the style of Mozart like you can't just like make up whatever so there's always that fine line where it's like yeah you have creative Liberties and then each Orchestra has its own style and so like Chicago is going to be different from La which is going to be different from New York which is going to be different from San Francisco so you have to like do this research ahead of time to be like okay what is the style of particular wind section or string section or whatever section you're hoping to join and match their style because at the end of the day even if you're a really talented performer if they can't see you fitting in that Orchestra you're not going to get the job and so you have to be able to like fit in with that particular sound there yeah yeah I'm just like Eddie Van Halen would not be a good soloist for a Steely Dan record even though he's a good soloist for a van record right right right exactly yeah yeah so there's always that like tight rope where it's like okay I'm going to inject a little bit of myself but then I'm still in an orchestra and I this is how they choose to to to perform there so it's it's kind of a typ rope there yeah awesome so let's talk about okay you've talked a little bit about how you got into music how you got into the school what your training was like at the school what happens uh after you graduate like like what do you do like What proportion of the people in your school are likely to be able to get positions at different orchestras or different uh you know I guess bodies of musicians cuz I I know that they're like jazz bands there probably a lot of other types of opportunity out there but what are the career prospects like uh given that you've gone through this incredibly rigorous educational process for at this point probably like a decade and a half yeah yeah I think by the time I had graduated at this point I was 21 so I started at 11 so that I've been at like 10 years playing my instrument and so it came time to be like what do we do now and so some people will keep getting degrees and they'll get a master's they'll get a specialist they'll get a doctorate they'll just they'll just keep tacking on degrees there um and some people they have the financial resources to do that uh and so for me I really wasn't sure if I was GNA stay in Rochester if I was going to move somewhere else if I move to California and so there were a couple of schools that I was interested in studying for my masters and I told myself if I don't get into any of these schools then I'm just not going to do a masters I only want to do a masters if I could do it at the school so I only applied to three schools with that assumption and the other thing was the financial component had to work out and so I said if I didn't have significant scholarships because I was on my own at that point because my mom was like look I'll pay for I'll help you pay for undergrad but like all the extra stuff like you're kind of on your own which I was like that's totally fair and so there were only three schools there was one in Texas um and then uh so I applied to SMU uh Southern Methodist univers yeah yeah so they had a really good OBO uh Professor there and I picked these schools solely for the music programs of course but then specifically the OBO professors because I was going to have to work with them for two years and so so I went I I applied for SMU and then also University of uh Texas uh Austin and then um also uh University of Michigan and so those were the three schools that I applied to and is solely based on the music program and specifically the OBO professors and my number one was like uh University of Michigan because I just like uh the teacher there is Nancy Ambrose King who's a world- class soloist and uh also a professor at University of Michigan uh but she like her playing is so incredible and then she's like also the nicest person like I locked up because I was able to work with the nicest people cuz not all oboist are nice and so I really locked off to meet like the really nice people um and so that was like my dream school like okay if I can get into Michigan and if I can get some sort of scholarship I really want to go there and so at this point since Rochester is closer to Michigan I was able to get a lesson with her so I I did have a car my senior year cuz I was doing this internship at a jazz station um for extra station like like a radio station yeah yeah and it was a yeah it was a jazz 90.1 and it was part of this uh internship program that you had to do because I was part of the Arts leadership program and so one of the requirements is if you you have to get an internship um and so that was the internship that I went with but they said hey you need a car and I was like okay I'll I'll try to figure out how to get a car so I I got a car there and um and so I was able to drive to do the lesson uh drive to m again and meet her and she was just super happy and bubbly and and we had a great lesson there um and so I was like okay I really want to study with her and so I auditioned a few months later and then was fortunate enough to get in and fortunate enough to get a full right scholarship I was like okay cool like we crossed off that's amazing so this is your master's degree so you're you're going to University of Michigan for a master's degree and University of Michigan has a pretty famous music program uh and like like for example like one of the bands that I really like wolf peek uh I my understanding is they all studied there and they were like classmates and then they form the band if you haven't heard Wulf peek V LF p c I think amazing band they do kind of like a jazzy Rock um and uh or funky Rock uh the bass player really good um and what I would uh say about that is like getting a full ride for a master's degree a lot lot of people correct me if I'm wrong if this is a misconception there's some degree of credential inflation in the sense that what used to be perfectly good a good enough degree getting a bachelor's degree now because so many people it's so competitive people are getting master's degrees and so there's like this kind of credential arms race that benefits the university but does not benefit the people that are taking on debt so I'm very relieved to hear that you were able to get a full ride scholarship uh but maybe maybe you could talk a little bit about that like like is it possible to enter industry with an undergraduate degree or is it generally like like What proportion of your peers went on to go get a masters that stay in music yeah I would say maybe a half like just got the the bachelors and and then they started auditioning professionally and then the other half got some sort of Masters and like kept going and so maybe like a little under half there um and and so I think some people at that point just knew like okay I'm ready I just want to go straight to uh you know auditioning full-time because that that I mean taking auditions that really is a full-time job uh in and of itself maybe you can talk about what that what that's like you just you show up and I mean how is it different from getting into a music studio when when you're trying to get a paid gig yeah so the way that the auditioning World works not just for like OBO but for all like wind instruments and string instruments is that you hear about auditions and position opening up and a lot of times you hear it through the Great Vine first and so you're kind of connected into that world and you're like oh so and so's leaving that means that position's going to be opened up and so before the official posting goes up you kind of hear about it so you can start preparing for it and um and so once a position opens up then usually the audition will happen a couple of months after it's initially posted and they'll be like all right we're going to hold live auditions and at this place so things move slowly oh yeah yeah it's not like oh we're going to open it up like you know the next weekend like usually it's like okay the auditions will be so they might post it in January and they might say something like oh the you know audition's going to be in April or something like that and so yeah so you're playing this like waiting game and of course you've got to like you know pay bills and stuff like that so you work all these like different jobs it's uncertain as to whether you're going to get the job right like yeah exactly how many people might apply like let's say hypothetically they're like in Los Angeles excuse me uh how many people might be uh in for a position in like uh you know a symphony or something like that yeah yeah so specifically within like La you have like the big big ones like La Phil um and then Los Angeles chamber orchestra so la chamber orchestra actually had an opening a few years back um so tons of people went out for that audition because that I mean the thing it's interesting with like technology we hear about people changing jobs every two to three years or sometimes less than that in orchestras people stay there for 15 20 30 years like that's like normal like people do not switch orchestras every 2 years cuz it's so hard to get in and then there a probationary period yeah it sounds like it's just like a very uh coarse kind of like uh there's a significant transaction costs associated with moving in and out of an orchestra and earlier I misspoke when I I said a symphony a symphony is a piece of music it's not the actual body that performs the music um so like how fre ly with these positions open up and yeah how many people I'm just trying to think of like the sheer volume of work that is done to prepare to audition for you know a seat I guess is what do they call it in an orchestra yeah yeah I mean probably for that La chamber orchestra there probably like SE at least 70 because I mean that position hadn't been opened up uh for a while and so everybody and their mother of course was going to go to that audition um and so you're probably looking at at least 70 people if not more from all across the country there and so you even if you don't live in LA you would find a way to fly out there and get there and take the audition so you apply there's always some sort of application fee that's like 30 bucks or whatever there application fee to apply for a job yeah yeah a lot of these have application fees not all of them but some of them actually will tack on an application fee like like in college which I I don't really agree with I mean that seems illegal but uh right yeah I'm just comparing and contrasting like let's say you apply for a job at like Salesforce or something like that like they're going to fly you out there if they think you're a candidate they're going to put you in a nice hotel uh you're going to go and you're going to interview then they're going to fly you back and uh you're probably going to hear back much faster and like the whole feedback loop is much tighter than this extremely speculative business of trying to get into an orchestra I mean it sounds like a nightmare uh from from coming from the software world and we can definitely talk in a moment about your what it was like though step Through the Looking Glass and see how things were done in software in terms of hiring but but uh because you've worked as a software engineer at several places now and and so you have like a little bit more context but yeah like like maybe you could talk so we we can kind of I don't want to just completely speed through grad school I'm sure that was an exciting experience too but I do want to get to software eventually but like getting into industry as as an OBO player what what was that process like yeah so I spent two years in grad school and but I had actually started my sheet music company jdw sheet music in grad school and I Just Whipped up a small website I had zero clue what I was doing but I kept talking about it for years and my friend was just like when are you going to start this thing you keep talking about it I was like well I don't know I don't have any business experience he's like just started and just figure it out I was like okay so like you know you're being 21 you're just like all right I'll just figure it out you 2 you started the business mhm yeah yeah so I started like parttime yeah so I started like part-time just kind of like on the side I didn't really know what this thing was going to be and I had I think at the time like six pieces that I I had arranged um on the p on on the website it was just for double reads and I whipped up a small little website on WordPress and just picked like a WordPress theme and I was like okay let's set some prices and make it live and and I had zero clue what I was doing I remember my first customer was actually my teacher at grad school like she bought a few pieces for a camp that she was teaching at I was like oh cool my first customer and then I had to figure out how to ship music cuz we didn't have the digital download feature uh like I do now and so were literally like printing music and did you like find it somehow and then ship it or yeah so I bought like The Binding material like I bound it myself and like I shipped it I shipped every single piece like the first year and so I didn't sell a whole lot cuz I wasn't like this was still just kind of like a side thing cuz I was busy with grad school and I was like teaching part-time in grad school and like performing and so grad school was very different because uh with undergrad it was like tons of coursework and stuff like that and like rehearsals and stuff and then grad school was pretty much like I barely had any classes which I don't know if that's like normal for like other Master pretty typical like it's less structured certainly that like you you might have some big project that you're working on like a dissertation of some sort or in your case was there some sort of composition what was your kind was there like a Capstone project so to speak for your master's degree yeah yeah so that we had to do a final recital at the end of our second year um and that was supposed to just be like a representation of like where we were at and so we got to pick the pieces that we got to perform there uh but uh we got to put together an hour length recital um and perform it for of course our teacher and then our peers and that was I guess our Capstone project or final project project and so we didn't have to write any like large 20 Page papers like some of the other disciplines like if I had done a doctorate then obviously that would have been uh involved there but uh but yeah and so once I finished up with grad school I was like I'm done with school I'm not going to go through a doctorate or anything like that I'm done and I wasn't even sure if I was going to stay in Michigan because I loved Michigan I love an arbor it's a great town I hated the weather so that was a challenge um and so I was like I don't know if I could stay like with this weather and so I was back and forth and I was like you know what I'll take the risk and I'll just move back to LA even though I don't know anybody like in the music space and so I was like we'll just you know just dive into there and it's a lot more competitive in La CU so many people want to live in LA and I mean I don't want to step on anybody's toes and saying this but to some extent like Los Angeles uh is the kind of like World capital of entertainment and to an extent uh one of the major capitals of Arts right uh so I can only imagine like how much more competitive it would be to apply for gigs and and jobs in LA versus like you know Oklahoma City for example where I grew up right right yeah yeah and so I decided to just move and I was like okay well I don't have any money or I have very little money so I'm G to move with my grandmother so I uh my grandmother had like a spare bedroom and I was like I'll just move in with her and it it kind of ended up working out because uh she was more advanced in age and so she needed somebody to kind of just be there to kind of help her out so it was kind of a win-win situation um and so I I moved there now at this point we're like around 2015 and I didn't know anybody and so I was just like okay let me start studying the music scene and see what kind of teaching jobs I can get see who are the contractors because I went down the freelance route um and so I needed to make relationships with contractors to actually get work cuz they were the ones that decided like okay who's going to get work and and I wanted to be on those list and so I kind work is there like yeah like session like recording sessions or live performances like how would you break out like the different opportunities that uh you know an OBO player would yeah so the basic opportunities you would get session work everything from like smaller recording sessions to obviously Disney and stuff like that um and then but all type of session work actually plays pretty well even if it's like an independent Studio they still pay their musicians pretty well um and so you do session work you have teaching so a lot of schools will have budgets um for like music coaches and teachers to come into the school and teach um like private lessons or they'll teach like you'll have like a general woodwin instructor or a brass instructor or something like that and you come in a few times a week and work with the kids so I had a few of those types of positions there um and then also you play in opera companies and so there will be smaller opera companies uh getting their start and they need musicians and so if you you know make relationships then you're able to get some of those jobs as well um and then also musicals uh that one's a little bit harder to come by just because like most musicals uh will actually just have uh what are called like read books like re D like read one and read two books and they will mainly go to like doublers woodwi doublers and these are people that specialize they play all type of woodwi instruments so they know how to play flute Claret OBO bassoon saxoph say doubling sorry to interrupt when you say doubling like they would record several instruments on top of one another so you might only need one bring in one musician to fill out like the sound that you're looking for is that what you're saying yeah yeah so you bring in these people yeah so if you wanted to uh bring them in for recordings you could do that but also just for the like musicals um like like if you were to do a production of like late Miser Rob or or something like that um I think that one might have an obone English horn book but a lot of these books are just say read one and then the read one book will be like flute saxophone you know bassoon it's it's like these assortments and it's going to be played by one person and so they'll play they'll start off yeah oh yeah yeah so if you ever look inside a pit if they're if if you're going to see a show and they have like live uh musicians there for a musical uh then you will see like all these Army of instruments around them and so they'll start off with like the flute and then they'll just drop it and they'll just pick up uh the bassoon and then they'll drop it and they'll just pick up and so talk about contact switching so you have to be like really talented to pull that off and so I had a few friends that did that but you can make really good money because obviously you have to like learn all of those really well to you know be able to pull that off um and so that's that's also a good career path as well if you want to go down that route but U those are basically the the types of jobs that I would do I would either do recording sessions and I was always teaching either private Studios or going into schools and doing like workshops and stuff like that um and then also doing Opera gigs doing Orchestra gigs so I would get a call and be like hey we got this orchestra concert or we've got this live event we need an oist here it is or we got this you know recording session or whatever and so the early years you just didn't get as many calls as I would have like cuz I was just getting started it's really competitive but I just kept making relationships and I just kept you know pounding the pavement and it all the while still you know on the side just running my sheet music company so I was working like a maniac but I guess that's something you can do when you're you know 20 something years old I don't know if I can pull off that schedule today but back then I was just like yeah we're just going to work all the time you know whatever so yeah I'm I'm interested for for people that are uh listening to this that are interested in you know entrepreneurship because I mean you're a successful entrepreneur in the sense that you created this differentiated product uh sheet music and what I would imagine is a pretty competitive space uh people publishing sheet music how did you differentiate yourself and how did you find a market um within that you would think fairly mature space of like printing things and putting them on paper and shipping to people like how did you do that in you know the mid 201s I think uh when you probably started that yeah yeah at first like I didn't really know like who my ience was going to be I was just like I'm just going to write for woodwind players but like what type of woodwind players are these professors or these some sort of educators are these like soloists like what are they looking for and so I really had to do some market research on like what do people actually need it can't just be stuff that I like it's like I got to fulfill some sort of need or else this is not going to be a business um and so I found out pretty quickly there was like a shift within the communities where there weren't a lot of Camp there were a lot of camps for like Orchestra or band if you want to do like a summer camp but there weren't a lot of Summer Camps or workshops just for a particular instruments so if you wanted to learn more just about trumpet then you would have to go to like a band camp or an orchestra camp and then take lessons with the teacher but there weren't really any camps specific to just trumpet or just double reads or flutes or clarinets or whatever um it's a there was a shift where more and more people people started creating these camps and one of my friends uh Jennifer she created this whole company but uh called vocal majority and it's a series of camps that are taught all throughout the year mainly in the summer uh but she had started this right around the same time I had started jdw sheet music and I remember when I went to a conference that she had a one small little table off to the corner and I you know spotted her and I was like I'm just going to go around and talk to a whole bunch of people and so she was one of the people I talked to and and she was that was her dream of just like having these camps all over the the place and it really blew up and like that's her like full-time job like she has a storefront now it's like it's kind of crazy um and it's like an early vendor for her essentially yeah yeah cuz like she had this dream of like having these double read camps but of course there's not a lot of double read just OBO and or like she wanted to have like OBO choirs and like OBO and bassoon choirs but obviously there's not a lot of music for that and so I literally write music to accommodate these types of camps and so I once I found that Niche I was like okay people are looking for stuff and I found that Educators even within more popular uh instruments like clarinet and flute and trumpet they were still looking for Duets that they could play with their students they were still looking for those type of music even though there's tons of flute you know music and trumpet music they were still looking for Duets and so I started cranking out tons of Duets um and trios it's like baller chamber groups there and yeah and that's yeah so many questions first of all when you say double read you're talking about instruments that that have two reads um yeah yeah so double read would be OBO and and bassoon uh instruments there okay and then so it's very specialized in the sense that you're just creating sheet music for these two instruments really um and then uh is is your Market mostly Educators then would you say that like What proportion of the people who would buy your sheet music were Educators yeah I would say like the majority were Educators so I started with double reads and then I expanded out into flutes and clarinet and trumpets and so now it's for mainly winds with a little bit of string music as well uh but that was really the niche because Educators mainly like private school uh or not private school like private teachers um were always looking for more music and then also even Public School teachers CU they would have chamber music built into some of their curriculums and they were always looking for more music uh whether it's flute music or trumpet music and so that's when I really like honed in and I started creating different uh pedagogy books addressing common issues for these particular issue uh um instruments and I started writing music for that so I had like a couple of little funny cheeky titles like for OBO there's an issue where you don't know which F to use because on the obal there's different FS that you could actually use um and a lot of students don't know which one to use in the appropriate situation so I literally created a book like what F to use and like everybody thought that was hilarious cuz they're like oh my gosh I run into this problem all the time so I identified like instrument specific like issues people were running into and would write like these little books about them and have like exercises and then that was when things really took off um in the music education market and so once I started getting sales through that and it really boosted sales that I wanted other people to carry my music but I was having a hard time initially uh cuz they're like oh you're just just some small time whatever and so I was like I got to get a big fish so people take me seriously so I went to JW Pepper which is like this really big uh uh retailer for music education they've been around for God knows how many years at this point but they're really really big fish everybody knows them in the music education space and I went to them and I said look I have a really successful line of these teaching books that you don't currently carry that is needed in the market here are my numbers and you should carry them they're like that's that works for me sold and so they started selling my music on their site and once I got them on then I was able to start you know telling people and being like hey you know I want to expand the number of PE people that are going to retell of Music we already have JW Pepper it'd be great if you could join our list they're like oh you're a pepper Okay cool so once I like you know dropped their name they're like oh you must be legit I was like that's I told you so you established kind of proof of concept in you as a sheet music uh proprietor for lack of a better word yeah I'm sure there's a better word than that but uh that's so cool first I have some observations about this this is I didn't know any of this stuff before I asked the question by the way uh I I just knew you had uh you know a you know reasonably successful organization where you were bringing in enough money to justify continuing business operations right which I consider a success if if you can if there's demand if you got traction then that is a success uccessful Venture in my mind uh so much of what you did was just leveraging your own tacit knowledge of going through education music education throughout your childhood throughout adulthood in you know going to these camps going to uh Retreats going through the studio system getting into uh universities like so you had all this knowledge of what was lacking and how it could be improved upon and so you you steep forward yourself you had the confidence to go ahead and try to fill that vacuum yourself yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah I mean like and second you had the audacity to do this I'm sure a lot of people are like man so frustrating that there's not the right cheat music for this specific type of thing but they don't do anything about it you did something about it you built a website and you started printing it and shipping it right right right yeah and then there was an interesting shift where I started I was shipping things for the first few years but then I was studying um in I was going to the dashboard and I wanted to see where are customers were coming from how many people would actually add something to the cart and then leave the cart why are they doing that like I I don't want them to leave the cart without buying like cuz that I don't make money so I started studying that and I noticed that a lot of people outside of the states would literally put things in their cart and then just abandoned their cart and I was like why are they doing this and then I quickly realized like oh crap okay it's obviously expensive to like they didn't justify which makes sense it's like okay I'm going to buy this sheet music and then I'm going to pay all this much in shipping just for my sheet music I'm like yeah that that makes sense and so there were a lot of people from Europe and Asia that were literally coming to my site putting things in their cart and then abandon their cart I was like oh crap this sucks like I'm losing cost shipping cost I think Amazon figured that out pretty early that's like the biggest deterrent to a transaction that's why they're so on free shipping and stuff and like getting people recurring sche that they' got going there um so digital printing was one of the Innovations uh which I mean ebooks have been a thing for decade Plus at this at this point like certainly in mainstream Consciousness uh but how did had music were people using like iPads while they were performing and stuff already or how hard was it to get people to pay for something that was digital yeah I think the industry was slowly shifting into that and in terms of people performing right off of their iPads it started coming around like early or I guess like 20078 n was like the first time that I remember I saw a doctoral uh recital where he played everything off of his iPad and he had like the foot pedals and I was like well this is weird you know so even back then yeah to turn the page I was like have P Hunter who had to watch along at least with piano I still see this piano yeah yeah like you somebody who's watching who can read the notes and knows exactly where you are and flips the page very gracefully at the exactly the right time just you know not have to move your hands off the piano right exactly yeah yeah it's so like he was using this iPad and like the foot pedals I was like that's weird and he was playing saxophone I was like dude just use a a stand cheet music but like um the industry was slowly but surely like moving in that direction and more more people I'd say nowadays more people some people still prefer just the regular paper but some people like that option and so since we were shifting in that direction digital downloads became more more of a thing for Sheet Music retailers and Publishers and so I was like okay we've got to find a way to let people like buy buy this music there and like it shouldn't cost them all this shipping um if they live outside of the states and so that's when I made the shift to like actually you know make it digital download so I went through and revamped the site and made sure that that you people could actually download the music so of course you had to like buy it first you can't just like randomly download it without paying for it but once you go through the checkout process then you will get an email it says congrats thanks for your purchase and then here's the download link and so uh implementing that was like a game changer because it like boosted my sales because now people that weren't in the states could actually buy my music and then just like download it straight into whatever device there and I was like okay that's that's the best move right there and the good the good thing is too like whether I'm on vacation or something like that then I'm still like getting downloads in in like just a few days ago I was getting uh multiple downloads and stuff like that while I was sleeping so it was kind of cool to still get people like buying my music while I'm sleeping and make money while I sleep I was like that's that's that's what we're doing there and I don't like the transaction operation right you you don't even have to be awake to get transactions done uh and that's the power sofware is essentially you're kind of cloning yourself or cloning parts of yourself the part that would pitch oh this is the sheet music you want or oh yeah here can you give me your credit card number like that's how business used to be done it used to be um an incredibly manual process with the internet uh and and you know automating things through websites and things and and I just want to emphasize you are your own developer you're an entrepreneur who is building and maintaining this uh e-commerce site by yourself um did you use like any Frameworks or um like like tools like I know a lot of people nowadays use like gumroad and things like that for selling digital download type items did you did you use any of those or did you just roll your own and and use different libraries how did you do it yeah yeah so I started off with just a basic WordPress site uh picked out a theme and then used everything uh for the actual transaction with woocommerce because it came with your own uh uh dashboard and then it worked with PayPal and so I figured that was the way to go and to this day it still works that way cuz I was like well if it's not broke let's not fix it WordPress Dev I know is like it's not broke I'm not going to swap out completely from the WordPress ecosystem a lot of folks using woocommerce it seems like a pretty pretty good uh setup like it's good enough right yeah yeah I mean I I it works really well and the digital download aspect works really well and and so I decided decided to just stick with it uh because at that point I hadn't learned how to code or anything like that and so once I did learn how to code I was like should I revamp it and I was like well it's it works and it's freaking get money so I was like no I'm not going to I'm not going to touch it yeah Engineers often like kind of bristle at the like if it ain't broke don't fix it but I myself am a uh I guess promogator of that philosophy at least when it's concerning things that it would take a ton of time and energy to swap things out you know um and I think that's why like 35% of all websites are on WordPress to this day like a significant chunk of the web runs on WordPress just because there are a whole lot of web Masters to use the very old term who are thinking if it ain't broke don't fix it like it's good enough yeah so maybe you can talk about once you as you became more technical while maintaining this website like what were some of the things you did using your burgeoning developer Powers Yeah so by the time the pandemic happened that's when I started learning how to code and I started looking at the the site and I was like oh you know maybe I could tweak it here and there and tweak the user experience this way and like start to uh you know beef up some of our metrics and stuff like that so I kind of just made small tweaks here and there just to kind of increase uh just better the user experience and then also increase like the my experience of of just tracking orders and stuff like that and so I never really made any like super major overhauls cuz I was just like I don't want to touch it cuz like you know there's money coming from there still even though I don't run it full time anymore I'm just like I don't want to touch it there and like um you know do some major overhaul and and disrupt things and so I would just go in and start making small tweaks here and there with with the skills that I've learned uh over time but yeah that's always been my philosophy so I don't know if I'll I'll ever do like a major overhaul of it I'll probably just small tweaks here and there there over time and just keep that thing running as just like a side project now and so you worked as a professional musician of course uh you you were can you catch us up on on how you progressed as a musician once you were back in La yeah when I the first few years it was just a few gigs here and there and so I would supplement income with just like random jobs and stuff like that and um what would a random job be like like teaching gigs and things like that or yeah it just be like different teaching gigs or whatever performance gigs I could get I would take and and later on if they were like paying a whole lot that I would have the freedom to say no but in the early days I was like well this doesn't pay a lot but I need the money you know I got bills to pay so um so even though I didn't have to pay housing I still had like other bills and stuff to pay so I was just like well we'll just take whatever G comes my way and so I I would teach all over La unified and and Out near Santa Clarita which is like 50 minutes Way Drive away and so I would just teach all over the place uh I teach out in Burbank and and stuff like that and just would find whatever gigs possible and there was a period of time where I would also uh I started this program called the musical story time where I would go out into uh libraries public libraries and I would go into uh private uh like uh preschools and kindergartens and charge him a fee and play there and so uh I just did whatever I could sometimes I do drove door Dash and I worked government jobs and so I was just like whatever puts food on the table like we're just gonna grind it out there so I just did kind of whatever I need to do those first few years until I built up more of a steady uh place of just music centered stuff but those early years it was just like whatever I could get like whatever pays the bills um I'll I'm just up for anything there so that those were the early days yeah yeah it sounds really pragmatic and then actually kind of like breaking through and actually working as as a musician like uh in terms of like having proper musical gigs in addition to your more entrepreneurial stuff with like the library system and things like that what was that like yeah I think the turning point was like a couple years being into La I started getting more in contact with more promident contractors that had the really good gigs like if you wanted to get calls for like the gramys or something like that or like Live Events or recording sessions uh so once I started making those types of relationships then they would be like all right cool we we'll you know do you want to play for uh this Orchestra and then once I did good in that gig then my name but start to get passed around so that was really the turning point where I started making an impression on some of the larger music contractors out there and starting to get uh paid for uh more um and so that was a nice Turning Point going from like just small little gigs to like oh this actually pays something you know like this is actually nice and so and getting like backtack gigs cuz like contractors of course no other contractors Etc so they pass your name around um and so it was really nice to be on those types of lists um and at that point then I didn't have to do as much like random jobs I could really just hone in and have my performance jobs and a smaller amount of teaching jobs and and still have the sheet music business running um but that was a good shifting point so that was around like 2018 or shows when things really started to kind of take off and I was like oh this is what it feels like to have like you know real money for the first time and not be like surviving CU those first few years it was just like literally paycheck to paycheck there would be times where it's like okay we still have like hundreds of dollars worth of bills to pay I don't even know where this money's going to come from we got to figure it out so coming from like that to going like oh I actually have plenty of money to do like auto pay and not worry that the money's not going to be taken out so that shift was like really cool when like things really started to gel with not only the business but then also with the the music part I was like this is what real money feels like that's kind of cool was there a moment where you felt like I've made it as a musician like like I can do this uh this can be my career longterm did you did you reach that moment I think when I started getting calls there was one call that I yeah there was a couple of calls so I got a call to do a gig with Fox Studios to be a part of I don't know if you are familiar with the show the Orville um and it's on Fox there it's uh by steth McFarland it's like a space comedy type thing and so I remember getting a call yeah like a spoof kind of like on on Star Trek yeah and so I remember getting that call um and that was from a larger like contractor uh that had given my name and then I had also gotten a call like the last recording session I did was for Netflix um and it was this Netflix animated short um so getting like those types of calls where I was like that's kind of cool and like it was so different cuz like some of those like early gigs it was like well we'll pay a little bit and then they were always like behind and it was super disorganized versus like when like someone from Netflix calls you like oh we have this recording project and everything like runs accordingly and they pay you right there you're like okay this is great I can get used to this you know so it was just like night in day from like the hot mess early gigs that I I went through versus like getting there and then also getting called to do the gramys even though that didn't like you know end up going through uh just getting that call I was like oh okay it was nice to get the call even though unfortunately talking about like the Cutthroat of the the industry um I gotten a call to do the gramys in 2020 of all years of course this is when Things Fall Apart um because it's 2020 and um and so I got a call to perform for a large like a very major artist and like I won't name the name there uh but they're a very major artist here I'll share it in chat so you can see but getting that call I was like oh I'm on that list I didn't even know like like wow that's kind of crazy and so um and unfortunately they had uh contacted like 40 of us and got like soft approvals from us and then they went in a different creative Direction and they were like oh we want to go from 40 to like 9 and I was like what why I was already excited about this yeah and so I was like H and this like happens like all the time where people just like change their mind I'm like H the music industry that sucks and so but it was cool to like get that call and it was like okay well I'll take that as a win though cuz then everybody gets called to do the gramys so yeah well let's talk about 2020 cuz that was the year that so much of the m music industry kind of like that was an inflection point frankly uh especially like if you're doing like Live Events or events where people have to congregate to perform that was basically they put a Kash on that right and and uh as far as I can tell so many musicians immediately lost their livelihood um how were you affected by that yeah that time was like crazy because it was full steam ahead I was doing like I had done a Cera performance I had done a few like music festivals like I was just booked up and then like two weeks earlier I was at Disneyland because I was one of the music coaches for the band and um we did this like really cool workshop with Disney and I remember it was like it's you know Disney on a Friday Disneyland on Friday so it's like packed and people were like oh are you worried about this like Co thing I was like ah no we'll be cool you know not knowing that like the whole world would fall apart like two weeks later so I was like way off Mark with that and so when the shutdown happened and they shut down you know they they declared it it was a pandemic and then La UniFi I remember being at a school teaching and the uh we were all monitoring our phones like are they going to close down La UniFi are they going to close it down cuz we knew if they closed La UniFi they were to close everything cuz La UniFi is like the largest one besides probably New York I would imagine uh School District there and so we weren't sure if they were going to like close us down and they they did and I was like oh man this is this is bad I don't know what's going to happen so when they told us like you know go home and stay home I was like I what I what am I supposed to do and so literally in one day all of my gigs that I had booked up until like September basically just disappeared seven or eight months worth the gigs essentially and I can only imagine how hard it is to get those bookings it's probably very hard to build those M those relationships maintain them you probably have to sell yourself a lot getting on the call and like oh yeah I can I can make that right right it doesn't just happen the business doesn't just roll in like it might for Star developer for example right right right yeah and so like I finally gotten to a point where I had a booked up calendar all the way up until fall and then like one day it was just all these emails of like this is canceled this is canceled this is canceled I'm like this is like tens of thousands of dollars I'm like what am I supposed to do and so I was like well this sucks and so the only income I had coming in was from the sheet music so I was able to to live off of that um and just kind of live on a tighter budget uh because I wasn't you know obviously didn't have access to the the other income but I really felt for those that had zero income especially those that you work so hard to get to places like New York like I had friends at the New York Phil that had to move out of New York yeah the Phil armonic yeah and they had to move out of New York back in with their parents or friends or or uh because they were getting paid and New York Phil like they pay a lot like they pay like a lot comparable to like a senior developer and so you're getting paid you know 180 1990 plus thousand a year so you go from that to zero is straight up terrifying especially in New York and so that was a really scary time for all musicians where a lot of us were either like living on other types of income or um a lot of my friends were going off of uh unemployment and stuff like that and so it was just like this is a crazy time um and we weren't of course sure at the time how long this pandemic was going to to last there and so a lot of people started just driving for like uber and door Dash or just whatever type of jobs that they they can get a hand on just to you know survive and at that time we still had the $600 a week uh at least for a little bit uh so some people were able to to get that um but yeah it was like the kind of like stimulus funds or the stimulus pack yeah yeah it was like $600 a week so I had friends that were getting that and they were really grateful for that cuz that's like you know that's still pretty good money there uh but but still yeah it was kind of crazy at the time yeah well thank goodness you built kind of a a side business uh that could help supplement your income and that's definitely like U an argument for diversifying your Revenue sources as a professional um what point did you really start thinking like I should get more into coding you know you've been maintaining your website you've learned a little bit of stuff but like when did you really kind of like double down on coding and decide that this was an area that you really wanted to build out yeah I think there were like two things that happened one was I started learning in 20 20 and only just because I wanted to build out the black Excellence music project um the story yeah yeah the story behind that was so now we're at June of 2020 the world is like a mess and uh George Floyd had just been murdered and there were a lot of conversations about race relations and the lack of diversity in many Industries including the one I was currently in which was specifically not just the music industry but the classical like world there's not exactly a lot of black and Latino representation compared to your white and so a lot of people were asking me about like oh I want to learn more about black composers for the past and present so I was like sending them links to just random sites that I had found um and I was like well this is crazy there should just be one site instead of like six or seven and if people can't find this on their own there should just be one that that could be easily found and so that's when I started building out what is called the black Excellence music project and version one was built with vanilla HTML and CSS and a little bit of JavaScript and after a few months of learning I think I was like five months in I finally just pressed you know publish I was like okay it's going to go out there and um we're just going to see what happens and I released it just before I believe um it was uh black uh Black History Month um of 2021 and I started just emailing it to my friends and that were teaching and they're like oh this is incredible I'm going to use it in my class I started sharing it in different social media and so it got really popular and then I had a few friends that were at the college level that were like hey I want you to come and do a workshop with us I was like that's cool so um I was kind of writing that way for a little bit and then I decided to revamp it and do a version two built with react and uh Tailwind CSS and add even more profiles and games and stuff like that um so I really started just falling in love with learning and coding and I gone through uh parts of the free C Cab curriculum doing the first few certifications and I I still wasn't sure if I was going to make the switch and actually make a career change because the world kind of started opening up I started getting calls again and recording sessions but it was in this like really weird Co postco world where it was just like you could come in but then you're going to have to be in this separate room and you're going to have we're going have to wait till it's like sterilized and all this I was like well this is not not fun you know and so I wasn't sure if I was going to like keep on going cuz everything had just changed and I wasn't as excited about getting back into things or what the quote unquote New Normal was going to be about and I was like I don't know I kind of like this coding thing but do I want to be a software developer like what does that look like it's so I just vacillated that whole first year of like do I want to do this do I not and the real Turning Point came when I had a a big job opportunity come from Disney and I turned it down to pursue software I was like okay I guess since I turned it down I guess we're actually going to do this software thing your heart was already kind of in software uh and like really KN until you had this great Musical opport and it's like kind of like the Two Worlds uh and you deciding which one which path you want to take like a literal fork in the road mhm yeah yeah so when I like said no to the Disney offer I was like well I guess we're going in in this other direction and I Luckily everything worked out but yeah yeah and and let's talk about your career as a developer so obviously you were very active on the Forum you were running uh of course your sheet music business you were still performing a little bit and I saw you early on just how uh I mean obviously you've got a ton of teaching experience teaching OBO teaching other uh you know musical Concepts uh at so many different levels and that immediately jumped out like wow she's really good at teaching she's really good at communicating Concepts she's probably you know teaching a lot of programming Concepts that she only recently learned herself so she the turnaround is really quick in terms of and and I always tell people like the best way to learn something really well is to practice it a lot but also to teach it to other people you know there's there's that Einstein quote uh that if you don't understand something well enough to explain it to a 5-year-old you don't sufficiently understand the concept yourself um so you immediately jumped out of me as a teacher of course freeo Camp's entire staff it's like developers SL teachers many of us have classroom teaching experience many of us have uh experience writing books tutorials of course you wrote a ton of popular freeo Camp tutorials I think we were just checking a minute ago and like in the past 28 days like more than 400,000 people have read some of your tutorials that you've published on free Cod Camp so even to this day even though now you're mostly focused on the curriculum uh you you have so maybe we could talk a little bit about that process of like okay now I've just turned down this Disney like how am I going to keep the proverbial lights on working as a developer and what your next steps were yeah I had a like very unique developer Journey because I think a lot of people that like transition into Tech they think okay I'm going immediately you know try to get a job within 6 months or 9 months and my whole thing was like I wasn't really sure how this was going to play out and so I just assume that I was just going to be kind of floating around and not be noticed by anybody and it like kind of didn't work out that way like I I was able to uh not only start contributing more to free camp but then also I got my first like you know contract work as a junior Dev from The Forum because I was just all over the Forum just kind of answering questions and just participating in the conversations to the point where a senior developer who ran his own company he reached out to me he was like Hey like you're super active we're looking for a junior Dev to come on part- time I was like you know I've only been doing this for a few months like are you sure and he was like yeah yeah I totally get that you're still early on but you seem to pick up things quickly and you seem like you will learn a lot and and we could throw you in the deep end and you'll figure it out I was like okay cool yeah I could do that and so I like got my first contract job and I was like working like part-time for this like small like tech company working mainly in the front end a little bit in the back end there um and so it was just kind of crazy how that just you know materialized just because I was like super active online I was like really active on Twitter and like different Discord groups and so my name kind of kept popping up and and like I was able I had a few people reach out be like oh we're looking for a junior Dev and this like period job market was like 2021 2022 where things were still pretty good uh this is like prior to 2023 where things just like fell apart um so the drug Market was much more like healthier and and that's where people were like oh we have extra money could bring you on as a junior I was like yeah that's that's cool and so I just started like working my way up to through different companies and getting that like hands-on experience which is what every career changer wants they just want that first opportunity so I kind of like locked up where I was like oh this is kind of nice um to get like these first few jobs and get that experience going and and so it was It was kind of cool and unexpected there but uh really fortunate that it it worked out that way yeah yeah and it sounds sounds like uh you were able to uh leverage your reputation having just been a prolific helper on the free C Camp Forum like posting answering people's questions and and interestingly like the free C Camp Forum it's not about answering questions so much as asking further questions and and guiding people toward kind of answering their own question almost like a cratic method U and that's something you've certainly espouse and a lot of the more prolific uh Forum moderators are big fans of like not literally answering the person's question but instead why are you asking that question you know what let what process LED you to this specific uh question that you're asking and making people introspect a little bit more and actually struggle with the content that they're trying to learn and I I think most teachers can identify with that like oh yeah that does work more because you're not like if they just want the literal answer they can type it into Google but if they actually want to understand why that's the answer they should go hang out on the Forum right or they should ask uh one of their friends that does software development so you you alluded to like of course like uh late 2023 there were a number of big layoffs in Tech and that had kind of like this cascading effect uh what I often tell people is you know software development is a squiggly line that's generally going up and to the right and there will be a correction in you know if if there hasn't already the total number of Developer jobs will go back to where it was um a lot of people attributed those uh you know those job layoffs to AI but I don't think that that's a that plays a big part and most people I've talked to who you know worked at big companies like the founders of stack Overflow I interviewed both of them on the podcast separately uh and talked to a bunch of other people in Tech and I don't think very many people think that AI is the reason that software developers are getting laid off much more likely it's interest rates have changed in the United States so you know investment and all this stuff I won't break out the macroeconomics or anything not that I'm necessarily qualified to explain it but uh when it's harder to get money to keep your business going uh and when you know like interest rates changing affect stock prices and other things like that and companies do layoffs and there's kind of like a herd mentality around layoffs uh a lot of companies don't ever do layoffs Apple has never done a major layoff for example like there are lots of very well-run companies that don't have to do layoffs they plan accordingly and then they're uh when I say hurting like a lot of companies they'll see like oh company XYZ just laid off a bunch of people we're cool to lay off some people too and then and like managers will it's it's a short-term fix like cutting costs but what you're really doing is you're shedding a whole bunch of people from your organization who are already effectively working whom you spent a great deal of time and money hiring to bring them on so generally you don't lay somebody off unless you absolutely have to or you don't know what you're doing as a manager which unfortunately is the case at a lot of big Fort 500 companies in the United States so um so you were working at freeo Camp part-time and you know like a lot of the opportunity on the side kind of evaporated so to speak uh or it certainly got harder to get gigs and things like that as a freelance Dev can you talk a little bit about that and I I just want to make sure I'm not mischaracterizing what happened or anything but you did say that like the market kind of tightened for developer talent and many people would argue that it is still harder to get a developer job today than it was in early 2023 um yeah what are your thoughts on on that yeah I think that you just well you just have more people out there on the market and so there was this interesting shift where like 2020 2021 2022 the money was flowing companies were hiring like crazy including like my previous company like what I was hired on they hired so many other people including more Juniors mids seniors Architects it was like it was just like money was flowing um for for everyone and like all my friends that were working too had the same thing where like there was all this just money flowing around where people were just hiring and it you didn't even have to really like Danny Thompson has this funny thing where he says on a lot of his uh Twitter spaces where he's like there was a time where like if you just knew what a function was you can get a job and like of course he's like kind of making a joke of it but there kind of was a time where like you know you really didn't have to try like that much like if you had some sort of basic skills you can code something they're like hey we'll take it we'll work with it there um so you didn't have to put in that much energy into your resume like or you know networking and stuff and then everything shifted at the end of 2022 and going into 2023 where the money stopped flowing like it was companies were losing money on products and services and then they were looking at their balance sheet and they're like I don't know if we could afford all these people and so uh they that's when they started just cutting people um it's I was uh part of the layoffs for my last company there because they were going through financial uh tough times and a lot of my friends were being laid off as well for for the same reasons and so now you have this whole flood of people coming from big and small companies out on the market now recruiters aren't just sending you messages like they were prior um now it's like hard to get a hold of a lot of recruiters you got to try extra hard and make sure your linkedin's nice and Polished and you have this like really really strong resume and uh making sure that you're you're networking and building uh connections there and so there's extra things you have to do and so I think a lot of people just weren't used to that especially people that have been in this industry five or seven plus years they really didn't have to try that hard like they could just rely on their skills and talent now they're just like now I have to you know constantly be updating my resume and have a LinkedIn profile and do all this networking like they didn't have to do that before because they just relied on their skills and someone would just hire them and it's not that that way anymore we were in kind of like a a privileged time in between busts so you could look at like the do bust as uh you know definitely a decrease in demand for developers you'd also look at 2008 um even though that was more of the financial sector it had significant repercussions uh for the job market for developers as well and then of course recently there's just been this huge buildup as every I I always say this like Tech will always kind of be expanding uh certainly like um on a longer timeline even though there it's like this sine wave you know the diagonal sine wave um because everybody wants to push everything to the software layer all precisely we were talking about like the you know e-commerce right you used to have you know call centers and people would call in and they make an order and you you know that would be like the physical postage layer there'd be like all these different things that now are handled by software and software is the act of automating things and therefore it will be the last thing that gets completely automated in my humble opinion like I I I think developers jobs are as safe as Jobs human jobs are uh I think ultimately it's probably the safest profession to be in now at the same time you're going to have to like skill up and like be much more aggressive about improving your skills and you're not like it's not going to be like The Simpsons where you're just walking down the street and the limo pulls up and offers you the job right that doesn't happen for developers in 2023 and or 2024 and it's not that um that was almost kind of a period of aberration but uh in every other industry Ian we talked about how hard it is to get a job in music right that's a pretty extreme example but you could argue that it's it's similar in like Finance it's probably similar in like uh a lot of the healthare space a lot of uh you know like real estate space service industry like we were in a very uh you know fortuitous position as software developers the past uh eight or 10 years and it may be a little bit leaner for a little while but I do think that we we'll get back to a point maybe not quite as uh auspicious a time as just passed but it'll still be a good action you know career that's worth investing time and energy and getting into uh it's just that like they're they're kind of like the fair weather people who uh are just looking for a good job that is reliable that has high income and I I totally don't fault people for that you've got family back in your country you got to remit as much money as possible to them or you you have a bunch of kids you just need to pay the bills and keep the lights on but um you know I I do think it's going to be easier for people to get jobs in Tech than it is right now but so I just want to be sure to sufficiently address this because it comes up all the time in the comments like people are like oh why are you even teaching people to learn to code anymore it's over no it's not over who the heck thinks it's over like only the most pessimistic you know person who's completely out of the loop with the macro trends that are happening in society with technology would think that software development is over as a field I'm very bullish on it but at the same time we have to talk pragmatically like there are going to be ups and down in everything and so I'll get off my soap box but I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that uh a lot of people who are feeling um angst about what's happening in software development and are feeling like should I really invest time and energy I mean first of all you're going to be doing this for several years probably before you're going to be at the level where you can go out and get a job as a software engineer and you know you should still invest that time the market is almost certainly going to improve over the next three or or four years so don't feel reticent about like uh you know going ahead and investing that time and energy right now in expanding your skills sorry I know that this is not like the Quincy Larson interview it's an interview with J okay let's get back to talking with you but what do you what do you think about that like do you have anything to add to that notion that that the market will eventually bounce back but that it's totally understandable why a lot of folks are like disenchanted right now yeah I mean I I totally get it especially if people are just learning maybe they're in the first few months of learning or maybe they've been learning this past year and they're just like man it just feels impossible to get in and to stay in I that's totally valid feelings but I would just encourage them one of the things that I feel like I tell people if they want to go into any career is talk to somebody that's been around way longer than you have that's that's been in a career for 15 20 plus years and I I've been fortunate enough to talk to those people that have seen those ups and downs and they're like look yeah this does you know suck right now it's not great but it will bounce back and they're right like they've they've been able to survive all of the craziness over the past couple of decades and so I think a lot of times people coming in that are newer they're only seeing the right now they don't see the bigger picture and so talking to people that have been in this industry 10 15 20 plus years will ease your nerves and it it doesn't help that there's a lot of talk on social media from like these influencers that there's some really good influencers but there's some that oh man they're they are not good at like do not listen to these people because they just they're just praying on like they they just ride the wave of the Doom and Gloom and there's all these videos of like this is the end of software and all this other stuff oh no and and I understand they're just trying to like build up their own you know following and everything but you know follow Danny Thompson he he's a positive pragmatic realistic dude uh and we were talking about him earlier and there's an interview that I did with him a few months ago uh I'm very proud of that interview and I encourage everybody if you're looking for some positive energy and you want to hear from somebody who has gone from frying chicken at a gas station to working as a software engineer at Big tech companies and creating course like creating a course directly with LinkedIn about how to use LinkedIn it's like one of their official courses and it's free by the way right uh I'm gonna add a link to that in case anybody wants to watch that in the show notes but um yeah uh keeping a positive attitude and accepting that like there's always going to be some amount of Doom and Gloom but the Doom and Gloom is out much you know in in stronger you know forces than uh than normal right now right right and I and I think too speaking about like AI like a lot of people are straight up terrified that okay what's the point of learning if they're this this chat gft all these tools it could just code for me and and here's the thing I think like it can whip up small simple things you give it a very direct prompt it will give you some sort of answer but I think for those that haven't worked in software and don't realize it's not just going to be some simple prompt like your client isn't going to come to you and be like here is a very direct prompt I want this and this and this and this and you're like oh great all of that's super clear I'll just whip up a website for you I'll whip up this application like that is not how this works there is so much back and forth and a lot of times clients don't even know what they really want they they'll say one thing and you're like is that really what you want and then you start talking to them you're like no actually you you kind of want this thing okay and so you have to kind of peel back those layers and really good software Engineers that have been around for a while they can kind of read between the lines and know how to design systems that are going to last a really long time and give the client exactly what they need and so chat GPT and all these other tools they're just tools but they're not going to replace really good software Engineers uh because it's not just about just showing up and just be like oh here's a simple prpt just whip it up and you know go to lunch and you're off on your day like you're solving complex problems and there's a lot of nuance to those types of problems and you have to think about it for a while um and chat GPT is just not there yet it can help you break down some of that but it's not there to just whip up a solution with vague information because a lot of times you you'll just get vague requirements from your client and you're like I don't really know how to break this down um so yeah a huge part of work with clients is understanding what they don't know that they want you know and being able to guide them through that massive decision tree that isn't even mapped out it just kind of comes up through these client meetings showing them your work showing them like a bunch of ideas that you you know mocked up in figma or something like that and getting them to gradually arrive at consensus of oh yeah this is what we should do we didn't know that we needed to do that having to go do research and figure out what what would be a good approach to solving a particular problem huge amount is interpersonal relationships it's communication I always like to say that like code is just the act of a human trying to communicate with a computer the most succinct explanation of what should be done in different circumstances and everything like that that is the actual code code is just a very tur uh machine readable language for articulating like in this very specific situation where the client has done all this stuff and is doing this we need to check and make sure that they did that and then we need to handle this situation this way right uh that's what building software is it's not like oh I took a photo of this napkin and it built me a website so I guess I don't need a web caller anymore like that was kind of like a a very cool demo that was done with like early versions of a lot of these multi multimodal AI systems and llms and stuff uh and it's cool it's impressive I just want to say like I'm not an AI hater I use AI all the time I ask chess GPT for like uh GPT running uh chat GPT running GPT 4 I ask you questions all the time uh and I'll use other llms as well just to see like learn more about how they respond to things and I'm getting better at like figuring out oh you're hallucinating there because that's not true and a lot of it is just knowing how to parse the feedback you get from a system like that that's a lot of the utility it's just getting experience using it and already knowing a whole lot about the domain you're asking about right like if you were to ask it about you know uh black composers for example that's a subject you know a great deal about right or uh OBO performance or sheet music or um you know like aspects of contract web development that you've done over the past three or four years right like you're going to be able to figure out where it knows what it's talking about and where it doesn't and you're going to be able to prompt it more precisely and get it to acknowledge that it's uh made some error using the reflection technique and all this stuff right like I can talk you know I can have extremely nuanced conversations with GPT uh about uh specific areas that I have domain expertise in uh and I I think that's one of the beauties of that tool but at the same time you know there's a reason why 400,000 people are reading articles written by Jessica Wilkins each month it's because they're really good useful articles and it's way better than the kind of like off-the-cuff response that GPT is going to give if people ask comparable questions so I think to some extent like and we haven't really talked about you know content creation uh which is essentially what you're doing when you're writing articles um but to some extent there's a flight to Quality there's going to be like all this AI generated you know dribble for lack of a better term there are going to be entire websites that rank very well on Google that are just you know and Google knows that people are using AI to generate articles and stuff free Cod camp we use AI all the time but uh everything goes through an edit probably like 95 to 100% of the words that I write well I can tell you 100% of the words that I write are creative by me I don't use AI for actually creating copy what I'll do is I'll use AI for um doing research uh right like along with reading all the top links that come up in Google and doing like you know full literature review before I talk about something so I I feel confident that I'm talking with some degree of uh you know confidence what do you think Jessica is is the feature of writing articles and maybe we can talk a little bit about the curriculum and some additional supplemental articles that we're considering writing uh for the Core Curriculum yeah yeah I do think that there's going to be like two categories of Articles floating around out there where it's kind of sometimes obvious if it's a like an AI like written article because it's it's going to give you the straight facts and it's going to like so if you're writing an article on uh I don't know the the query selector you know method and it will give you the straight facts and be like here's the basic syntax here's a basic example but there's not a really a lot there unless you keep trying to prompt it to give you more um and so it's I think that people that it will invest in their writing skills and have their own voice will actually stand out more uh from these AI generated articles because the AI generated it's it's mostly going to be correct but it's not really going to have a unique voice it's just going to be a very dry like straight to the point here's your information um and it's just getting stuff from what they find from like documentation but as a writer you can inject your own style your own voice into it your own examples like one of the things I love to do is just I like building out my own code examples and throwing it on codepen and sharing it with people um to like help teach a concept and like AI is not going to do all that for you like they can whip up some code and you have to like you know test it out yourself but they're not going to like shape it into where it's more of like a narrative there they're just going to give you like the dry facts and so there's going to be kind of a a a difference between like AI generated articles versus those that were written by experienced technical writers that have their own voice they have their own style um and so there it's actually going to benefit those that want to build out their technical writing and kind of uh build out their content and following there um because they'll be able to stand out a little bit more for all the right reasons U so I think it's actually going to be a benefit there and and I think people will still be able to rank pretty high if they're writing um technical articles regularly and they'll still be able to to compete with the other AI generated content that's going to inevitably just come out within the next few years there yeah yeah and I'm excited to see like how it improves but you know chat GPT like like GPT 4 model is trained on more than 10,000 free Cod Camp articles it's also trained on probably millions of stack Overflow responses all this stuff right like one way to look at it is like it is the largest most prolific most powerful plagiarism engine ever uh and I I say plagiarism engine because it doesn't necessarily even remember where it read the stuff but it's kind of like a human like obviously when I'm writing a tutorial at some point I had to figure something out and I'm that might have involved me reading some thread on stacker overflow or reading an exchange on the free Camp forum and I don't remember that I read that like it's just in there somewhere right kind of like if you're playing some sort of musical piece you might uh inadvertently kind of like quote or use some style of some other musician that you've listened to a lot of music from them uh that's just how the human brain works and it turns out that's kind of how neural networks work uh with Within These llms is they don't necessarily know how they knew something they just predict the next token which just this the next sequence of tokens just happens to sound a whole lot like something Jessica might have written in one of her CSS tutorials or something right right right yeah it's it's going to be interesting how the landscape is going to change over the next few years but I I because people are always worried like oh I'm just going to be replaced I was like if you really learn your craft and just dig in especially learn deeper because a lot of people are like oh it's too saturated and by response is like it's not as saturated as you think like yes earlier on there is going to be a lot more competition especially for obviously the junior level jobs but if you really dig deeper and really learn those core skills really well you're going to be able to stand out because a lot of people aren't going to dig that deep they're going to say okay I kind of have a surface level knowledge of like HTML and CSS and JavaScript and yeah that's cool and and they're not really going to push themselves to keep learning more and building more ambitious projects and that's a way that you could stand out uh it's the same thing with writing there where you can really build out your own unique unique voice and kind of find a niche area that you want to write about um and and still be able to get notice there yeah yeah and I'll just add that like even software Engineers that are really at the top of their game uh a guest who I've already recorded but is going to be on a uh on an episode uh in in a few weeks uh Logan killpatrick uh worked you know Julia Lang on the board of num Focus uh which runs like pandas and a lot of other po uh python projects uh he got a job at openai their first ever developer Advocate and uh he said he applied to hundreds of jobs right uh before he got the job that he wanted and so just just know that it's intrinsically hard to get a job as a developer employers have every um incentive to be incredibly selective because if they make a mistake if they bring on the wrong person that person can do so much damage within a code base uh introducing security flaws introducing all you know all kinds of like uh just downtime potentially like they could crash a server or something like that or or they could you know you can just imagine all the nightmare scenarios that they accidentally wiped some production you know database or something like that right uh they're entrusted with a great deal of power and also developers are expensive you bring on a developer you spend all this time and energy training them it takes approximately six months to get up to speed to where you're actually a net positive on a team and what if they hired the wrong person that's 6 months that they can't get back it's a whole bunch of money they spent training you that they can't get back and now they need to go do the whole search again and find somebody else for your position and so there are a lot of reasons why it's hard to get a job as a developer um and they're not just because it's an extremely competitive field like music right uh like like if you're a musician and suddenly you just stop showing up to your job they can probably replace you uh but they probably haven't incurred as much damage as you know like a giant tech company would have incurred giving you all that access and uh you know having you potentially like I'm trying to think of like uh and I keep it on music because we've spent so much time talking about that today let's say hypothetically I'm hired as the bass player for a funk band which would be you know my dream come true and uh I uh I just completely sleep in I I take the job like I'm really serious when I'm interviewing and then like I take everything for granted and I start thinking I'm I'm like hot stuff and uh people are like why do we hire this guy again they're just gonna kick me out gonna be on the street and they're gonna have a new Bas layer auditioning pretty quickly right it's not like that when you're a startup and you've got like Tech you've got like all these additional considerations that so I think that as competitive as music is it's probably uh much it's probably much easier to like lose your job in music than it is as a software developer at like a big tech company because there are so many different considerations and meetings they have to do all these interventions they've got like all these protections uh for like an employee and stuff like that so I'm all I'm trying to do here is not like um necessarily like excuse the fact that it's so difficult to get a job as a developer but to kind of give you some context from the employer perspective and as to why it's so hard to bring people on uh you know free C Camp is a great example like we are extremely slow to bring people on and we've never had to lay anybody off because we're super duper careful about uh managing like whom we bring on and the way that we bring people on is precisely how we brought Jessica on and that is to look for people who are already star volunteer contributors within the free cocaine Community who already active in the open source project who are already active helping people on The Forum who are potentially writing articles about subjects they're interested in and then say hey if we were to give you the funds to be able to do this full time would you be interested in doing that right and uh so that's kind of how we bring people on and as a result we grow very slowly but we grow very deliberately it's a big difference from like a tech company that just you know got uh rais their series B and they have like a $100 million do to go out and hire a bunch of devs they're still going to be pretty careful but it it's just like the kind of like hiring slow versus they may feel obligated to show their investors that they're quickly bringing people on and that might create kind of the boom bus cycle that you see at a lot of tech companies spending a great deal of time and energy hiring people and then unceremoniously laying those people off on big Zoom calls or something like that uh six months later so uh I just I guess the whole reason I'm talking about this uh is just to give you additional context and maybe I'm not saying like you should feel empathy for these giant corporations but it will help you maintain your sanity as you're applying to jobs if you can at least kind of see things from their perspective uh as you know as irresponsible as a lot of these companies may seem that's kind of the incentives they're responding to people respond to incentives and if their incentive is to bring a whole bunch of people on so they can uh reassure their donor their investors that they're putting the funds that they just raised to to good use and they're making forward momentum toward their projected earnings and stuff like that you know those are different incentives than if they're a small charity like fre C Camp that we're just going to wait for the perfect person the perfect just Wilkins to come along and then we're going to bring her on and we're going to nurture her Talent right so um I'd love to talk a little bit in closing about the curriculum You've Been instrumental in helping develop the updated JavaScript interactive curriculum if you go to freeco camp.org learn you can see and you can play essentially the interactive you can build you can learn uh basic JavaScript by building a role playing game uh what are some of the other project projects that are in the updated JavaScript curriculum yeah so we have a total of 21 and uh most of those are what do we considering like practice projects and so that's where we lead you step by step uh so the first one is the role playing game we're going to start with some basic HTML basic CSS um and then we dive straight into JavaScript and we learn the basics about working with loops and variables and conditions and all that fun stuff and we learn all that by building uh step byep a roleplaying game then we move into a calorie counter project so this is the first time you're actually going to work with user input how do you validate that user input um and then we move to a music player project featuring your music and so um it's it's kind of a cool project there where you can play and pause and shuffle songs remove songs all that fun stuff uh and then we have a few of the other ones are a platformer game a date formatter a a repr a minimal reproduction of the The Forum leaderboard uh those are just a few of the things that you'll build and it each project is supposed to focus on a specific uh concept or series of Concepts and so for the platform game you're going to be learning about object oriented programming uh we also have a shopping cart project that does the same thing and then we also teach asynchronous JavaScript and so we have you build out an author's page we have you build out a form leaderboard and so each project is meant to to teach you or help you review certain Concepts um and we spend lot of time building this out it it was great to release it in December of last year and uh work through uh the feedback there but I think a lot of people like the more engaging uh step by step because they can now put the pieces together and say oh okay that's why we use objects and arrays and all of these different methods because I think before it was a series of challenges but then people are like how do I build a web page and so we like built out this new curriculum where you can build out these projects with HTML CS us a JavaScript and put all of those pieces together and so we're going to keep just working on it and making it even better based on the the feedback that we get yeah and what's the mech mechanism through which we get the feedback like how do you generally hear feedback from the community Learners who are going through these campers as we call them uh going through the JavaScript curriculum yeah so I'm I'm super super active on the Forum I'm a little bit less active on the Discord I still kind of hop in there and peek around but I'm not as active in the Discord community and then I'm even less active on the redddit uh Community but I think by far probably the biggest ones would be Reddit or be uh Discord and and forum and so I just go through the JavaScript we have a little JavaScript sub form on there and I go through and I help answer people's questions and and talk with them and I want to get a sense of like okay what are they struggling with what do they like what do they not like and so if a question keeps popping up and I'm like okay why are people is there a theme Here is maybe the directions might be not as clear or maybe we need to add a code example or maybe we just need to rephrase it or maybe there's been times where we've broken up a step into two because it was just too much for them um and so I'm just going through God knows how many posts at this point a week and just like going through and seeing like what are people getting tripped up on and if I see a theme then I'll go ahead and create an issue um and most of the time we open up issues for the community to contribute to so if I feel like it's a really small issue I try to create as many first timers only issues because a lot of people want to get started contributing to open source but they're really intimidated and so I try to create nice beginner friendly issues where I'll say okay this needs to be changed here's the file you need to change here's our contributing guide and I give them a road map and they're like okay cool this is something that I can contribute to it's less intimidating um and then we also have help wanted issues where it's like I need we need to update these tests or we need to do this this or add a new step or whatever um and it's less handh holdy that way they can still just get the basic information just run with it um but I try to open up as many things as possible for contribution because so many people want to get involved um and they want to find those good issues and then for the larger issues where it's like oh we're changing a whole bunch of steps that's where the team will step in be like all right I'll I'll take that on um and so that's what I've been working on the past few weeks some of the the bigger changes that we're doing um and and just change uh you know updating things uh it's better to just have a team member that's that's more amiliar with the code base CU if we're going to start adding and removing a whole bunch of steps then we don't want to obviously regress to the point where it's like okay this thing doesn't work and so it's better to have somebody that's really familiar with the the code base and that's definitely something we it took us a long time to learn and appreciate it may sound obvious like well for like complicated changes you don't necessarily want just any open source contributor well-meaning uh who can spend time scrutinizing code and potentially open a poll request and we accept tons of poll requests from the community but there does become a threshold when your legacy codebase is so uh you know Baroque that um Baroque like complicated right orate um what's what's a better word I I was just thinking bro because we were talking about uh most start earlier but like um uh where where it's Byzantine that has a negative connotation too where where it's complicated enough I'll just use the the B right yeah the code base is complicated enough that uh you know a lot of people don't have the level of expertise where they can you know change things in all the different places to get that to work so with open source you do want to have a core team that's focused on the problems and ideally you know paid staff who are paid to sit around and think about these problems and think about how the curriculum can can be improved and at this point I'd say like about half of the work at freeo Camp is done by the small core paid staff and about half of it's done by the open source community and volunteer contributors creating articles and uh answering questions on the Forum and uh potentially contributing to the curriculum itself so um yeah that took a while for us to to wrap our head around like the reason a lot of Open Source projects don't really go anywhere is because they are never able to like bring on an actual staff to help drive it forward and when you have volunteer contributors they have to be extremely galvanized and motivated to actually be able to have like dramatic step change impact on what your what your project is is doing uh usually you're going to have like a founder or uh some other people that are like super motivated or um at least getting paid something so they can be able to focus on uh expanding these resources so I guess what I'm trying to say is don't be shy if you are an like you shouldn't expect open source software to just work and for like the ecosystem to just naturally progress uh different projects like you are going to need to have people who do nothing but like eat sleep and breathe that project to continue to push it forward and um there will be incremental you know improvements that come from the open source community and then there will be like dramatic improvements that come from a deliberative process uh by a team of software engineers and in in our case uh teachers so um yeah U if people want to get involved as volunteer contributors what are probably the most immediate ways in your opinion having risen up uh as a volunteer contributor initially yeah I think for any open source project but especially with free Cod Camp is to join our Discord or forum and so uh just joining in the community so you can get some more context of like what we're trying to do what kind of issues are available talk with other volunteer contributors that's a great place to start and both of those are free you don't have to like pay for anything like that um and so you can just sign up real quick and start to join in and and talk with the community and then just start monitoring the issue boards and so because we released a whole bunch of curriculums not just the JavaScript one but the python one and the English one uh we are constantly just going through auditing things and creating new issues and so be on the lookout for first-time only issues those are going to be really small they're going to give you essentially the answer and changes that we want um and that way you'll be able to uh ramp up and start to uh run things locally or on git pod if if that's an option that you want to explore as well uh and then if you want to look for other issues just reach out on Discord and say Hey I want to keep contributing but I'm not really sure like I'm still a beginner I'm still new to this and people will uh reach out back on the form and Discord be like oh pick up this help want an issue or pick up this or pick up that and so if you're not really sure where to go next people will help direct you and they will literally link to you and be it's we don't assign issues um but we only assign it to like core contributors that have been there for years or team members uh but if you're interested in a help oned issue then you could just pick it up and and you know read through the issue and whip up a pull request and and we'll review it there yeah and a lot of work goes into getting these issues ready for just any developer uh or even like aspiring developer to walk in and see this and be able to understand the problem and so we do our best to kind of tee those up so that you can get an easy win by uh like especially if you see like the first- timr only uh label on some of the GitHub issues that means we know how to fix this but we want you to figure out how to fix it so you can get practice at this and there's so many reasons to get involved in open source because in my humble opinion working as a you know a reasonably large distributed team free code Camp's got 30 plus people working on the codebase um it's the closest thing you can do to working at like a large company that has like a large Legacy code base like Google has billions of lines of code it's at least two billion lines I think in a giant repo they have their own version control system because it's so complicated they don't use get um but like open source if you look at free COC it's a pretty complicated project there's a lot of moving parts and you can get practice it like wrapping your head around the different parts by contributing to open source you can contribute to lots of other big open source projects like the python libraries you can even user facing projects like uh for example you know Firefox or uh some different Linux distributions or things like that right uh contributing to open source is one of the best ways to get practical Real World Experience outside of working in an internship capacity or working at an actual employer which means that you know it's it's going to be a great simulation it's going to be great experience and a good hiring manager is going to realize the value of Open Source contributions and that it's not you know just nobody snaps their fingers and has like a really active GitHub with like all these projects they've contributed to they have to rise to a certain level of quality to have their their work accepted so you know I I would encourage people who are thinking about getting into Tech like definitely don't sleep on open source cont contributions it can be a great way to work with a lot of other developers communicate and build out those skills uh I want to make sure that uh I want to be mindful of your time You' you've given us so much of your time Jessica uh but like were there any other uh parting thoughts or messages you have to people who are listening who are getting into Tech and potentially wanting to follow in your footsteps get a job as a software engineer potentially have freelance clients potentially build uh a project like uh the black Excellence project or um potentially start a small business like you've done that has just continued to uh took along over the over the years yeah I I guess like by like I guess parting work words there would be like to make sure to join a community I think one of the biggest mistakes that new developers make is they try to do this by themselves and if you're going down the self toop route especially like you don't need to figure everything out by yourself like you're brand new to this you don't know what you don't know yet and you don't need to try to figure everything out alone there's other people that have walked literally ahead of you that are going to be like oh hey be careful about this Pitfall or oh I tried this and this didn't work and so when you are part of a community you get to learn from other people that are you know a year ahead of you or two years or 20 years ahead of you and so when it comes time to learning like we got a lot of people that join the Forum and they're like I'm brand new where do I start or am I too old to start learning how to code or uh because people you know give me feedback on my resumés and stuff like that and so when you join a community people will jump in and give you help and they'll provide their insights on their Journeys and it's going to be probably pretty similar to yours um with the selftaught journey and and so like just don't try to think like I'm just going to put my headphones on and just you know learn to code by myself like like go talk to other people because they're going to have like stories and they'll be able to help you uh especially when it comes to jobs one of the huge helps uh was that when I started joining different communities where people were talking about I remember there's one Community I was kind of or one company I was interested in and a few PE I mentioned it in a Discord and they're like oh my gosh don't worry there it's so toxic and I was like oh okay like I never would have known that unless people like told me about this and I was like I was about to totally apply and go down that route um this was a few years ago and like I had just no clue and so they're like oh stay away from these types of you know companies and you really look into these companies and so um you just want to have people around you to help you and and too like a lot of people want to stay like they ask like how can I stay motivated and my thing is like motivation will come and go it's not going to be this like constant motivation thing and a lot of people are kind of surprised by that when they go through this journey um but I think just building the discipline of I'm just going to do a little bit each day and you don't have to knock it out of the park each day I think a lot of new people think like oh okay I'm going to learn HTML and I'm going to learn CSS and then it's just going to be this easy Road there going to be times where you end the day you're like I don't think I understood what the reduced method does I don't think I understood what recursion is today and that's totally fine like people think that's like a bad thing but it's like there's some Concepts that just take longer to understand and so just kind of give yourself some some Grace there and and and just keep taking it just one small step at a time just to riff a little bit on what you said because I mean there's so many great um portable things there that we we'll try putting some of those in the thumbnail for the video you don't have to do this alone motivation will come and go I'm just going to do a little bit each day um to answer the question that so many people ask probably one of the most common questions I get am I too old to learn to code it's two letters is no I learned when I was like 30 31 uh I know people that learned to code in their 50s and got jobs at Big tech companies like apple and stuff it it's definitely doable and as long as you think you have like another 10 or 20 years of career left in you it probably makes sense to start learning coding worst case scenario you'll be able to Pivot into kind of like a Semite technical role coding knowledge understanding how machines work understanding how organizations work like the hive mind of developers that builds up a code base that is never bad knowledge to have on hand in fact I'd argue that there is no knowledge that is not power you know this the Mortal Kombat 3 um you know uh arcade mode thing I I I totally agree that like you should definitely learn it and don't let age intimidate you and um yeah uh thank you again so much for your time for sharing your uh lived experience for sharing what it's like to become a professional musician so hard right I mean so Journey yeah and then to leave that once you you're getting the calls from Disney and then to just leave that behind it takes some serious audacity but um you know it's the hill climbing algorithm you get to the top of a hill you look over you see a higher Hill human nature I don't want to climb all the way down this hill just to climb up another taller Hill but you don't have to immediately but you can look in the mirror and every day am I ready to start going down this hill and climbing up the other Hill right and and climbing down and up is not really it can feel like that but in reality you're probably you can keep your day job as I say right you didn't shut down the sheet music business you didn't immediately turn away all your students and all your gigs and stuff you just started learning on the side and that's a very pragmatic way to do it so thank you so much for your time Jessica it's a privilege and an honor to work alongside a creative like thoughtful teacher like yourself software engineer like yourself and uh yeah thank you yeah this was awesome thanks for having me everybody tuning in until next week happy coding\n"