Hello World

Hi and thanks for visiting my website!

I'm really happy you're here. It's kinda funny; for as much as I code and as much as I enjoy reading, this is my first personal website and the first blog I've ever written. I don't really like writing about myself or putting myself out there. I think it stems from a fear that I don't have anything interesting to say or value to give. If you are like me, dear reader, then I encourage you to try something that scares you today, and when you come out the other side it still alive you will have lived that much more.

Who am I?

When I taught coding classes at Code Fellows I introduced myself to each new class with, "Hi I'm Adam, and I'm a law school dropout".

And yes I did drop out of law school many years ago (story for a different time). Really though it was a way to start talking about my own coding journey, and to contrast the psychological un-safety of my law school classes with how I wanted my class to be a safe psychological space. It's ok to be wrong, to not know, and to break code. I love that it's impossible to know everything. Error messages are interesting, and when those error messages change you're making progress.

Everyone starts somewhere.

I started with BASIC

Do you remember the first "Hello world" program you wrote? I do. It was on a Windows 98 machine, my uncle walked me through the setup process and gave me a How to Program for Complete Beginners 101 book. My first program, written in BASIC, was the quintessential "Hello world" that I'm pretty sure is a rite of passage for all newbie programmers. I wrote a program that drew a diagonal line. I wrote a program that made beeping noises. And like many self-taught programmers learning alone from a book, I hit a wall and gave up.

Fast forward many years later and I was looking for a career change. Law school didn't work out. I was interested in learning how to code, but I still wasn't able to teach myself. My buddy Andrew told me about a coding bootcamp named Code Fellows, and I started my first real coding class as a student in 2020. I learned web development, Python, and I never looked back. 🙂

def main():
	print("Hello world, again!")


if __name__ == "__main__":
	main()