I’m repurposing this blog. It once held my thoughts about theology, philosophy, and church. I still think all of that is important. All of those ponderings and musings are hibernating in an .XML file on my desktop and are likely to stay secret and safe. It’s not that I’m ashamed of any of what I’ve written or even that I disagree with any of it. But I’m starting over.

In a way, that’s been the theme of my late 20’s and my 30’s so far. At age 27, I became a minister and loved spending time with my flock of middle schoolers, high schoolers, and adult volunteers. I had studied in college to be a music educator (though I know I didn’t want to do that – that’s another story). So at 27, I started over from studying to become a musician to working as a minister.

At age 32, I started over again to become an estimator. That was by happy accident. I knew I wanted to leave the pastorate I was in, but didn’t know what was next. Before I left, a kind man offered to train me on the job in estimation. We made controlled environment rooms. He was one of the best bosses I’ve ever had, but I didn’t feel especially alive when I looked at blueprints and air filtering calculations. That takes a special type of aptitude that I lacked.

And so, at age 34, I decided to change careers and start again with a free bootcamp called LaunchCode. I honestly can’t remember who recommended I tried my hand at programming, but I gave it a shot. I felt like a butterfly in a windstorm. Overwhelmed, confused, excited, and completely over my head. I was never good at math. I always liked the idea of logic, but the syntax and the way words worked in computing were just completely foreign to me. The program taught us JavaScript in the fall and Java in the spring. I never got to use those languages in any professional setting.

Because in the winter of 2021 we had a baby (my wife and I – mostly, my wife). I had to drop out of LaunchCode right at the start of the optional capstone section. It was just too much. That means that I had no finished product to show to potential employers. I was a sparse resumé full of non-profit work and a bootcamp with nothing to prove I had learned anything from it.

I completed the Google Analytics certificate via Coursera in the summer of 2022. I enjoyed learning R and Tableau and seeing all of the things you can actually do in an Excel sheet. And I was spamming companies (quite thoughtlessly) with desperate applications, hoping that something would stick. My head was drifting towards data analytics, but my heart was set on anything that would pay.

Through a friend, I landed a job doing WordPress development for a marketing agency. And so, I started again at the age of 36. PHP was completely new to me. WordPress core was deeper than I expected. For reasons, that job did not last long and I was soon starting over again, this time on unemployment.

Five months of job searching (hunting even more desperately than before) mercifully ended with another chance to start again. This time, it was working with the powerful customer relationship management system called Salesforce. As a contractor, I was hooked up with a large healthcare provider doing Salesforce development on a great team with a great manager. I knew absolutely nothing about Salesforce or Apex or how the automation can work. Thrown into depths beyond my capacity, I learned something new on the job every day. And learn, I did. From everyone on my team, from the Trailhead modules online, and from countless tutorials, I learned my new trade.

By this time, I’ve had learned how to learn. That’s probably the single most important skill I’ve acquired in the last ten or eleven years. And it’s a good thing, too, because I’m being laid off in a week and a half due to budgetary cuts. It is what it is and that decision was made by folks I’ve never met and likely never will. So, now what?

Now, I start again. The story I’ve told here might seem like job hopping. I see it as needful adaptation. Over and over again, life changed, an occasion for work presented itself, and I learned as much as I could to rise to that occasion. I’m joining a local cohort to learn Apache Spark and big data analysis. I’m upskilling my Python from hobbyist to more of a developer. I’m polishing my SQL, Tableau, and even Excel skills.

I’m scared and excited and confident that tomorrow will be okay. Because every day, learning as I go, I start again. This is the story of my journey into tech.