I was always a builder and a creator. When I was a child, my favorite toy was legos. And I never built something with legos and played with it. I built things, then took them apart and built something else. When I worked in the golf business, my favorite place to hang out was the club repair shop, where I could build and customize clubs for other people. But the problem with that was I spent maybe 30 minutes a day on average in the shop--and 9 hours a day doing retail. So I switched careers to something where I get to build things regularly.
I began by doing marketing, web development, and design for a startup SaaS company in Denver, called AuthRocket. The only reason I was offered the position was because it was run by my brother. On day one he asked me to build a website. At that point, I had never done anything like that before: I'd never seen the code behind a website, I didn't know what Javascript was all about, I had never heard of CSS, and while I had good instincts when it came to layout/design, I didn't know how to use tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. I was about as green as I could have been.
That was 3 1/2 years ago. After a few years with AuthRocket, doing part marketing and part web development, I decided to take the development path at full speed, choosing the most difficult and intense dev bootcamp I could find, and enrolled at Turing with the plan of getting really good at the most enjoyable aspects of my last position.