A Little Love for Reading Glue

As many of you know, I have stepped away from my full time job to focus on developing and launching Reading Glue. While working on the programming side of things, I am trying to get people connected to us either by visiting the site or by social media. It would be really awesome if you could help me out by spreading the word some. I have put together some small snippets you could use in an email, Facebook update or Tweet.

Here is an interesting site that is aimed at improving a young child's reading comprehension http://www.readingglue.com

Teaching parent's how to teach reading... what an interesting concept http://www.readingglue.com

This seems like a great way to reinforce what children are being taught in the classroom. http://www.readingglue.com

By no means do you have to use what I put together. I know many of you are much more creative then I am, so I am sure you could come up with some great ways to share the word. Feel free to promote our blog as well. It is at http://blog.readingglue.com on Tumblr. We are doing something a little different there. We are allowing the public to submit posts on our blog. If you know someone that might have some compelling experience to share with parent's, then please forward that link along to them.

I know it is a lot to ask, and possibly confusing for some of you who do not know what Tumblr or a Tweet is (Grandma I'm looking at you). Since I am unemployed, all I have to offer for your time is a big thank you and possibly a bear hug the next time I see you. I appreciate everyone's help!

Lessons Learned After Ten Years of Sales in the Manufacturing Industry

Last week I called it quits with my current career of working for Chi Cheng, a Taiwanese based electronics manufacturer.  I wanted to share some of my lessons learned from the past ten and a half years working in sales, engineering, and project management.

Everyone on the team has the responsibility of business development.

Every manufacturing organization has a dedicated sales/business development team.  This team may have the support of a sales engineer or project manager, but the responsibility of selling is pretty much placed on the shoulders of the account manager.  My belief is that everyone should be selling.  I have brought in more business as an engineer than I ever have by focusing strictly on business development or sales.  Whether you are a sales rep for a manufacturing company or just a floor sales associate at Best Buy, people immediately are on guard thinking you are trying to force a sale on them.  I experimented with this over the years, and 9 times out of 10 customers were more relaxed if I presented myself as an engineer rather than a business development manager.  They never felt that I as there to push a sale, but that I was there to help them solve a problem.  I could take the opportunity to present solutions that I knew favored my companies expertise.  Usually these were solutions that I knew our competitors struggled with.  Sometimes the solutions I suggested were not the most efficient way to manufacture something, but it was the only way we would end up being able to win the job.  The thing is that once you plant an idea in someone's head, it is hard for them to step back and think outside of that box for a better solution.  This is why I think it is important for every person in your company to understand they are actively be involved in the business development process.  Everyone needs to understand how their role can contribute to this process, and use those multiple roles to set you apart from your competitors during the whole sales process.

Being honest with your customer is the most important thing you can do.

I have built some amazing customer relationships over the years.  The secret sauce to these strong relationships is honesty and the trust that comes from being honest to your customers.  I learned early on that being completely transparent and honest with your customers is not a common thing in the ODM and OEM supplier industry.  Suppliers are always hiding information from their customers.  They only communicate information on a need to know basis, and they never communicated delays or mistakes until it was too late to recover.  Part of this has to do with the Asian culture not accepting and embracing failure.  By communicating your delays or struggles to your customers early on, you earn so much more trust with them.  My customers always knew that they could trust me to be transparent with the schedule impacts and struggles that come up during the development of a project.  You would be surprised how understanding a customer can be if you are up front with them about your struggles from the beginning.  Open communication allows for schedule or design changes to be made that might be able to help you.  Many customers feel the need to micro-manage suppliers.  When there is an open and honest communication channel, the customers are less likely to micro-manage everything you do.  Trust me, this benefit alone is worth it.

Use knowledge management as a way to make customers rely on your services.

I would say that knowledge management is probably one of the biggest issues that organizations big and small struggle with.  It is very easy to learn from your own mistakes, but the challenging part is to communicate these lessons learned to an entire organization.  Many times our customers struggled with this more than we did.  It is hard for them to manage this information across many development teams, and so it is up to the supplier to make sure that knowledge learned in the past is shared efficiently with the customer.  I have seen many projects where lessons learned were never openly shared with the customers, and everyone repeated the same struggles time and time again.  I think suppliers struggle with communicating this information, as it is easy to be perceived as a way of pushing back at the customer's design requests.  In some ways this is true, but it all comes down to how you communicate back to your customer.  Development engineers hear "we can't do this" from suppliers all the time.  Instead of telling the customer that something cannot be done, you can present a specific case backed by historical data.  Explain the cause, effect, and solutions based on past cases or experiments.  This allows a customer to make changes or suggestions based on actual experience rather than theoretical results.  Customers start to depend on you to help manage this knowledge learned over time, and breaking the relationship with you becomes harder.  Effectively using the lessons learned over time is an easy way to continue growing business with your existing customers.

These are the three biggest lessons that have helped me build a successful career over the past ten years.  Hopefully I was able to give you some ideas on how to improve your relationships with your customers regardless of the industry that you are in.

Last Day With Chi Cheng

Today is my last day working with Chi Cheng.  I am going to take some time to put together my thoughts on the past 10 years, and what I have learned along the way.  In the meantime I wanted to share an email that I sent to my team today.

As many of you know, today is my last day working for Chi Cheng.  After 10 ½ years, I have decided that it is time to move on to pursue other interests that I have.  It is tough to type this email as I consider so many of you as my friend.

I want to thank the management team for all of their guidance, patience, and leadership.  I only had a technical background when I came to Chi Cheng, but with the help of the management team I was able to learn how to effectively manage projects, engage with the customers, and how to lead a team to success.  Thank you for giving me the opportunity to learn and grow over the years.  I would not be in the position to achieve my dreams if it was not for the great mentoring I received from all of you.

I want to thank the R&D and PM teams for all of the excellent support you have given over this time.  One thing that sets Chi Cheng apart from all of our competitors is the innovative solutions we are able to come up with to solve problems.  You all have taught me so much technically, and I am amazed every day at some of the technologies we have developed over the past 10 years.  The PM team has worked endless hours in order to keep up with my demanding style of project management, and I cannot thank you enough.  ACC would have never achieved the great successes we have seen if not for all of your hard work.  In particular I need to say a special thank you to David Tan and his team.  I have spent more time working with him and his team then I have spent with my own family.  No matter the arguments or frustrations, his team always treated me with kindness when I visit ZCC.  Thank you so much.  As I step away, I have full confidence that you all are able to manage the projects better than I ever could.

Jeff, Judy, and Norman always made me feel at home during my 10 years at Chi Cheng.  I guess when you start out as a “family business” that mentality spreads around to all of the employees.  I always felt like family when I was working with all of you, and I think that is why it is hard to make this decision to leave.  Although it is hard to say goodbye, I am very excited for what my future holds.  I am taking a break from the manufacturing industry, and going to focus on how I can use my programming and business development skills to build products to make the society around me a better place.  I hope to continue relationships with all of you.  If any of you come to Chicago, please be sure to reach out to me, and I will do the same if I come back Taiwan or China.  Thank you again for everything.  I could not have asked for a better team to spend the past 10 years with.

What Would You Like to Do if Money Were No Object?

I saw this video earlier this morning and it hit home in so many different ways.  The video poses the question of what a person were to do with their lives if money were not an object.  How would that change the career we enter?  How would we focus our time and passion?  I have pondered this question on and off again for a couple years.  As a father of two young children, it is hard to discount the fact that having a stable and well paying job is important.  Making a change to just leave a job is a hard decision when you have a family who counts on you to provide for them.  I have recently made some decisions in my life which shall be revealed in later blog posts.  I was really taken by the quote "It is better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing, then a long life spent in a miserable way."  It may have taken me a long time to actually have the courage to act on this concept, but the past couple days have been such a relief knowing that the wheels are in motion.

Although I was inspired to make changes in my life prior to seeing this video, I thought it was important to share with anyone who may still be indecisive of taking a risk to make their life happier.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Eating Some Rubeque

I took a little break from the major stresses of my life for about 2 weeks.  I completely disconnected from all things work related.  This included anything to do with my full time job or work on Reading Glue.  Wednesday I was back in the saddle and trying to catch up with the 500 or so emails that were waiting for me.  By Thursday night I was caught up and ready to get back into the groove of completing features needed to start user testing on Reading Glue.  I am not sure why, but I had to do a quick search for something related to a question I had with a Ruby class, and I came across the site Rubeque.  Rubeque is a site that has tons of Ruby koans (practice problems that you solve using code).  It is a great way to sharpen your skills using Ruby.  I had landed on the site a while back, but had not really played around with it.  I decided to try out a couple of the problems.  To my surprise, I was actually challenged a bit.  These were elementary level questions, and I felt that they probably should not be challenging me this much.  It really shined a light on how little I really know when it comes to writing code.  The past 6 months have been full of building Rails apps, front end coding, but I have not really worked on much Ruby that has forced me to learn more.

After being tested by a couple of the initial questions, I decided to put everything on hold that night and jump into working through some more problems.  My favorite part of Rubeque is the fact that after completing a problem, you are able to view other people's solutions.  I find it very interesting to scan through the different ways people attack and solve a given problem.  As I am searching for a solutions to my problems, I find myself reading through the Ruby documentation.  I always told myself that I needed to slowly work myself through the Ruby documents, but never took the time.  These problems have forced me to read through it to find the correct methods needed to solve a given problem. While playing around with these problems late at night, I have found this to be very addicting   Both Thursday and Friday nights I would tell myself that once I completed the current problem that it would be time to go to bed.  After completing the so called "final problem of the night" I would take a peek at what was next.  Being the gunslinger that I am, I would immediately try to quickly solve it.  Sometimes it was a quick solution, and other times I needed to study it a bit.  After completing that "final final problem of the night," I would take a peek again at the next problem.  The cycle kept going until I would get a text from Julie at 3AM telling me to get upstairs.

I am not sure where the name Rubeque came from.  Could it be any relation BBQ?  I love BBQ.  I love it probably more than any other food.  When I sit down to eat BBQ, I always end up overeating (as proof by my waistline).  I doubt the names have any connection, but I have found that I have a similar lack of portion control with Rubeque and BBQ.  It is a fun way to challenge yourself to learn better ways to code in Ruby.  I have completed the elementary level questions so far.  I would like to make it a goal to work on at least one problem a day.  So while others are making resolutions to trim off the weight for the new year, I am going to be gorging myself with Ruby.

Social Coding, Why Did I Wait So Long?

I have been pretty active on Github for the past couple weeks.  Over the previous six months I have used Github to host my code so I could push to Heroku.  I also found myself on Github reading wikis or readme files for some of the gems I use.  As a beginner, I did not feel comfortable getting any more involved in the open source community.

A couple weeks ago I was watching my server logs and thought to myself "Wow, this favicon error that keeps popping up in my logs is really annoying."  It did not stop anything from running, but every call to a view in my app had an error that the favicon path could not be found.  I saw this error in a couple of my apps, and decided to find out what was causing it.  Come to find out the favicon path was being called in my application layout, which was generated by the twitter-bootstrap-rails gem.  It was a simple fix from what I could see.  I just needed to change favicon_link_tag 'images/favicon.ico' to favicon_link_tag 'favicon.ico'.  I changed my code in the application layout, and sure enough it worked.

When I was going through Code Academy (now The Starter League), we were encouraged to get our feet wet by helping out on some open source projects.  I always have been afraid to get involved.  To be honest I was not even sure how to get involved.  This seemed like a really easy fix to make, and I could get my feet wet by contributing to a project.  I went to Github, forked a copy of the project, and started digging through the files.  I realized the folder structure of this project was much different then I was used to with a Rails app.  There were generators, themes, and everything seemed different from what I was used to.  I was finally able to find the generator files that produce the application layout code, and revised the faulty favicon area.  I had to update erb, haml, and slim versions of the layout.  Now that I revised the code, what in the world was I supposed to do to get it back into the main project?

I searched Github and found their documentation to be very easy to follow.  All I needed to do was create a pull request.  As I created the pull request I started to get very nervous.  What if I did something wrong?  What if my code breaks the project?  I have errors in simple code all the time, so how was I to insure I did not overlook something in my little late night experiment?  I figured there was only one way to find out or learn my mistakes, and that is to submit the pull request.  Three hours later my pull request was merged into the project.

I know the change I made was really simple, but I was overjoyed that I was able to finally get my feet wet on a major project.  This also gave me some confidence to dive into the open issues and try to help out others.  Some questions were easily answered, and others were far more complex for me to handle.  One of the open issues was based off of the fact that the read me file was not clear about "fluid" meaning a responsive design.  I updated the readme file, created a new pull request, and this morning that change was merged as well.

Last week I also forked another gem to create a custom version of it for me.  The gem is called blogit.  I needed to customize some of the views and functionality for creating the Reading Glue blog.  I keep the modified version of the gem on my Github account, and can update my apps gem directly by the link back to my version on Github.  For the most part this gem resembles a normal rails app.  It was easier to know where to find files, and to understand what I am looking at.  It was also a great way to dive into more complicated code, and learn better ways to refactor my own code in the future.

One year ago I had no clue how to code outside of some very basic html and javascript.  Nine months ago I started looking at Ruby on Rails, and felt overwhelmed.  Fast forward to the present and I am feeling comfortable contributing to open source projects or forking other people's code for my own customizations.  I am not sure why I chose to wait so long to start using Github for social coding.  Maybe it was just a fear of getting involved and failing in front of the world.  I did not realize the learning benefits that come from contributing to the open source community.

Are you learning to code and only using Github as a way to store your code?  I highly recommend getting involved in a project.  Even if it is closing out open issues, updating a readme file, or something else that is simple.  You likely have the skill set to help out in some way, and I guarantee you will learn more as you continue to stay connected to the project.

Building Just To Build

8 days ago I was exhausted from a day of Christmas decorating. We went to cut down the tree, I hung lights outside, took care of decorations inside the house, etc. I ended the night on the couch with a Celebration Ale and watching Nation Lampoon's Christmas Vacation with Julie. It is a tradition in my family to watch this movie on Thanksgiving weekend. It is also a tradition that we endlessly cite lines from the movie. Over time I have noticed that we are not the only ones that do this. It seems to be a popular tradition among those that are near my same age. I thought to myself "It would be cool if someone had a web app that released a quote from the movie each day of December until Christmas. Kind of like an advent calendar for Christmas Vacation quotes." In the past I would have wished someone would take the time to build out something stupid like this. But wait, I just took a three month intensive training course to make web apps. Why not just build it myself? Well, I introduce you to Griswold Advent.

After getting done with work around 10PM on Monday I opened up iTerm, TextMate, and started coding away. After about 3 hours of work I had a functional app that spit out a quote, and limited when quotes would be shown and on what day. In other words, the system would not start showing the first quote until Dec 1, and you could not see future quotes until the day it was supposed to be shown.

On Tuesday I threw in some Twitter Bootstrap to help give me some quick styling to work with as well as a responsive design for anyone looking at the site from a mobile phone. By this time I was probably about 6 hours into things. I pretty much had everything done. Just needed to clean up some things, buy the domain name, and launch. That is until I spoke with my Uncle. He said it was cool and all, but he would never remember to come to the site daily. He doesn't use Twitter. What he needed was a daily SMS.

I took that as a challenge, and Wednesday night I dove into the Twilio API documents. I started playing around with the Twilio ruby gem, and in about 15 mins was able to send a test SMS out. I started coding and had a fully functional SMS system that could: receive a phone number from a user, store it in a database, send a verification text, receive the verification reply, mark the database entry as verified, and also remove an entry if they texted STOP back to our number. The API was pretty easy to use. Twilio performed a workshop at Code Academy (now The Starter League) when I was going there, but I had not attended. I had something else going on that evening, but kind of wish I had now. It would have made this integration go that much quicker. Even though I had it working in a couple hours, I still had some bugs and problems to work through. Most of the bugs were actually stupid mistakes you make from coding on no sleep. I ended up messing around with things from around 10PM until 4AM to get it all working right and bug free. That also included jumping back and forth between other work I am involved in, but I would say at least 4 of the 6 hours was playing around with Twilio.

Twilio isn't free, and I knew if for some reason my stupid app caught on it could end up costing me some money. I didn't mind it, but it would be cool if my time and money went to a good cause. I decided to promote a charity: water campaign as a way people could give back for the daily laughs they receive. I set that up on the main page as well as learned how to create a rake task that can be run by Heroku to send out the daily texts automatically. I set up a scheduled task to send out the daily SMS messages to those that had signed up. I also had to clean up a few issues that were seen in IE 7 and 8. I am not a fan of IE, so I really didn't want to spend a whole lot of time making sure the site looked good in them. I did what I could in a minimal amount of time and got it looking somewhat presentable. I am sure those users are pretty used to seeing sites that look like crap, so I am not too worried.

I sent out a few emails, posted it on Reddit, and set up a Twitter account. I decided that sending daily tweets out myself was too much work. I needed something automated like the rest of the site. I grabbed the twitter gem and created a scheduled task to send out the daily quote through Twitter at the same time the system sent out the daily SMS messages. Everything was done, and seemed to be working on my development setup. Now it was just time to wait and see what happened at 12AM Dec 1 when the site would stop redirecting to a coming soon page and go live automatically with the day 1 quote. Everything worked like a charm. The next test was at 10AM on Dec 1 to see if the SMS and tweet tasks worked OK. Boom, the SMS was received, but the tweet did not go through. I later found out that there was a problem with how I was truncating the quote, and it exceeded the 140 character limit. By day 2 the tweets were going out automatically as well.

So in about 12 hours of actual working time I designed and built a simple web app that few people will ever care about. I know the amount of time I put into this is way too much for what this app does. That is obvious. The thing is that I really do not care. I had an idea of something I wanted to see built, and I did it. There is a sense of pride in this process that outweighs the time I could have been doing more valuable work. I also exposed myself to the Twilio and Twitter API's for the first time. Most of all, I learned from the experience. These little mini personal hackathons have always been valuable for me learning and being able to take that knowledge and apply it to something more important like Reading Glue. Once you learn how to build things, you find that you seek out little projects to create just because you can. It can become addictive, but it also becomes a great way to continue learning. That is why I recommend to anyone that they should build just to build.

Can You Come Up With 750 Words Each Day?

I suck at blogging on a regular basis.  I am usually too busy to take the time and write about what I learned.  Even more important than this, I hate realizing on most days that I have nothing new to post about.  That isn't a good thing when you are supposed to be putting all of your effort into proving out and building a killer web app.  I can't really post about my full time job activities due to confidentiality agreements, and I am not sure they would be interesting to most.  This week I tried out a new web app called 750words.  The app can be used kind of like a daily journal.  It is to help people just take some time and type about anything and everything that is on their mind.  Some people use it to track metadata, goals, reminders, etc.  It is just a way of forming a daily writing habit.  I decided my primary focus on using the app is to hold my self accountable for the goals I set for myself each day.  My routine I have set up so far goes a little something like this:

1.  In the morning while work email is downloading, I take 5-10 mins to talk about how I am feeling that morning.  Any great ideas that came to mind over night.  I also list down my goals for the day.  This can be anything from tasks that I need to complete on Reading Glue, an area of my code that I need to debug, or figuring out how to spend quality time with my family for the day.  In the evening or  next day I summarize how may of my goals I succeeded on, or why I failed.

2.  I am tracking meta data and listing when I have urges to chew.  I have written about quitting before.  I always end up falling back into the nasty habit.  Too many times I rely on nicotine to get me through stress, which happens to be a lot of my work day.  I am trying to track the time I have strong urges to chew in hopes that I can see patterns in my lifestyle that need changing.  Hopefully 750 Words can help with this, along with a pack of Nicotine chewing gum...

3.  I also plan on using this as a tool to look back and find the connections between the times I am happy and the times I seem down.  I haven't struggled with depression in a long time, but sometimes feel like I slip into it.  Much of it is seems to be brought on by work (my full time job that is), but maybe getting my thoughts out each day will help me truly track down what is the root of the problem.

So you might ask "how is it going?"  Well after only a couple days it feels good.  I am not sure if it is something I will be able to stick to everyday, but I think it is something worth trying.  I always had the habit of reading RSS feeds in the morning.  It feels good to publish my own thoughts rather than read the thoughts of others first thing in the morning.  One thing I realized is 750 words is a lot more than I originally thought.  It seemed like I was typing forever and I was not coming close to finishing.  I am sure it will come easier as times goes along.  Hell if this whole process helps keep me motivated and accountable for the goals I set for myself, then I should have a shit load of content to write about each day.  Before I close out this post, I have to give a shout out to Mike McGee.  He is the one that introduced me to this site, and the idea of writing every morning.  The dude posted for over 1 year straight every day.  Now if that is not dedication, then I don't know what is.  I am not trying to break any records like that, but I am eagerly searching for ways that I can improve myself as a father, entrepreneur, and person.

Control + Alt + Delete

Originally posted on the ReadingGlue.com blog.

If you are a windows user, then you probably know what the Crtl + Alt + Del command does. It basically is a way to kill off a process that is not responding. Over the past few months, we have been working hard to develop solutions for parents to ease their pain of practicing reading with their child. The problem is that each parent struggles with unique problems and we have failed to execute on a solution that works for everyone. This past weekend we decided to hit Ctrl + Alt + Del and start over. We are going back to the drawing board. Instead of jumping into the process of developing solutions we want to truly understand the root of the problems parents face. Only once we understand these problems will we be able to develop a solution that eases the pain parents and children face when practicing reading. If you are a parent of a child in the grades pre-k through 5, then we want to talk to you about the struggles you face when reading with your child at home. The process only takes 20 minutes. If you are in the Chicagoland area, then we would love to treat you to a cup of coffee and have a quick chat. If you can't meet with us in person, then we could set up a phone call or even online chat. After our discussion, you would get the opportunity to help us design and test a solution that transforms the way reading is practiced outside of the classroom. If you are interested then please fill out the form on our contact page, and we will get in touch with you to set something up. Share the link with friends or family if you think they might be able to help as well. In addition to starting over with the development process of Reading Glue, we are proud to announce that starting next week we will have regular blog posts from reading experts. These posts will showcase tips, tricks, and exercises you can use to help enhance practice time with young readers. These posts will be ideal for parents who are looking to improve their knowledge of best practices when it comes to reading. These posts will also be very helpful for teachers who are looking for ways to improve their reading sessions in the classroom. Please feel free to leave us a comment if you have any particular subjects you are interested in hearing about. We want to thank everyone who has supported Reading Glue so far, and we look forward to working closely with the community as we develop tools that everyone can benefit from.

Code Academy - So, what now?

I am sitting here scratching my head wondering where the past eleven weeks went.  I can't believe this spring quarter of Code Academy is over already.  It seems like yesterday that I was banging my head against the desk as I was trying to figure out a ruby problem given as homework.  Code Academy has been an unbelievable experience, and I would suggest it for anyone who has struggled to learn how to code on their own.  Here are a few things I walk away from this experience with:

• Programming is a lot easier to learn when you have a teacher like Jeff.
• The best practice is muscle memory.  Anytime I did not practice what we learned I usually forgot it by the next week.  Anything I practiced 2-3 times was ingrained my my mind and i never hard to look back a notes.
• Learning how to 'learn' is as important as learning how to program. 
• Pair programming is much more important then I ever thought when I cam in on day one.  I learned a lot by working with different people each day / week.
• The Chicago development community is second to none when it comes to helping people out that are learning. 
• Passion and persistence can take you further than you expect.

After wrapping up the classroom portion of CA, I participated in my first ever hackathon that was not associated with Code Academy.  The Hackatrain was a unique experience.  While riding the brown line around Chicago, I worked hard at creating something new.  I decided to test myself and see what I was really able to build in 6-7 hours.  My goal was to build a music app that allowed users to upload a MP3.  It would be loaded into a community playlist, and the user could not upload another MP3 until their original one received at least 3 "hell yeah" votes.  If their song ended up getting more than 3 "totally bunk" votes, then it would be removed from the playlist and they could try again.  The goal was to have a streaming playlist my friends and I could use to share new music with each other.  By the time it was ready to present I had created an app that allowed users to sign up, sign in, and upload music to an Amazon S3 bucket.  The music that was uploaded was listed on the main page and a user could select a song and listen to it.  I had to use a backup plan for managing the uploads and it made it a bit hard for me to complete the voting system in time.  It is not the cleanest code, but I walked away with a smile on my face and I did not feel ashamed one bit when showing other more experienced developers what I was able to accomplish.

So, what now?  That is a great question, and I really do not know the answer.  I am still passionate about getting Reading Glue launched.  I submitted an application for the Lean Startup Challenge, and hope to get accepted.  Regardless of the challenge, I will be working hard to prove or disprove the business idea.  At least I now know that I have the skill set to build most ideas that come to mind.  I was also asked to mentor for the summer quarter.  I am really excited to share what I have learned, and I think this will be a great way to stay on my toes.  Something else interesting also came up this week.  I have an interview on Thursday with a local startup for a junior developer position.  When I started this program 11 weeks ago, I had no intentions of making a career change as a software developer.  I slowly fell in love with development, and I am really excited to be seeking opportunities to continue my learning of this craft.