Who I Am, and Why I’m Doing This:
My name is Dominic Smith, and I am an aspiring developer.
The tl;dr version is I am a San Francisco native with a degree in Anthropology who is now trying to become a full-stack developer. To reach this goal, I am currently enrolled at Galvanize’s six month long full-stack course in San Francisco.
The longer version is that I am also a veteran who deployed to Iraq and served as an all-source intelligence analyst in the Army. Since leaving the military in 2011, I graduated with a Bachelors degree in Anthropology (and a minor in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies) from SF State in 2014. After looking for jobs as a civilian intelligence analyst after college, I decided that in order to stay in the Bay Area (my home and the home of most of the people I care about) I would need to find a different career path. Enter Galvanize, and gSchool.
I have recently embarked on a journey to become a developer. In preparation for this journey I’ve done some self-learning, mainly through great resources like Code School, Code Academy, Javascript is Sexy, and few dead-tree books. To be honest, programming is always something I wanted to learn. I’ve never really been someone who lacks confidence, but when it comes to things math related, I’ve always felt subpar. Because of this, for a long time I believed I couldn’t program because i’m not very good at math. But once I got over my fears of inadequacy and just jumped in, I learned that it wasn’t that scary or beyond me.
What you are looking at now is my very first attempt at a legitimate site. All my other projects to date have been ‘Hello World’s’ and tutorial exercises. This is ground zero, this is my foundation… and I promise that it only gets better from here.
I’m going to keep a blog during my education at Galvanize. In this blog, I’ll talk about some of the lessons I have learned, and the curriculum at gSchool. As I get more advanced, I’ll start including project diaries, and other fun stuff I discover along the way.
Until next time.
PS. This image came with the Jekyll theme. In honor of the themes creator, I’ll leave it here.
