Jacob’s Technological Biography

March 25th, 2025

The Origin Story

Jacob has been deeply initiated into the esoterica of modern-day magic known as Software. This magic is electric in nature; mastery of it is mastery over electrons and protons. In Jacob’s career he currently stands as the Engineering Manager over the Cyber AI Innovations Portfolio at Deloitte.

Having become fascinated with video games since the age of four, Jacob always thought he could make his own game and promptly picked up scripting and game development via ActionScript and Adobe’s Flash Player (now known as Adobe AIR) at the young age of eight.

Soon after getting a B.A. in Economics from The University of Texas at Austin, Jacob discovered podcasts and became an avid listener to all sorts of entrepreneurs and self-help shows.

Among the many guests he heard on The Tim Ferriss Show, Jacob was particularly inspired by Ryan Holiday - a modern Stoic and bestselling author - and David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of the avant-garde Ruby on Rails web development framework.

Hearing that DHH didn’t pick up programming until he was twenty-five showed Jacob The Way to breaking into the tech industry, a highly competitive and cut throat professional field.

Bootcamp Beginnings

From a series of serendipitous connections and influences from friends in the high tech industry, Will Siegfried at Meta, and William Labanowski at Amazon who is now running his own social betting platform, WagerLab, Jacob was inspired to attend a coding bootcamp. Just months after graduating, Jacob felt ready to throw his degree into the fire and start fresh building upon the cornerstone of his True Passion, video game development. While the gaming industry wasn’t the professional path Jacob took, Jacob used video game development as a means to fuel his career growth.

Since the age of twelve, Jacob dreamed of building an online, networked, real-time multiplayer action game–inspired by titles like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, RuneScape, and Maple Story. Jacob quickly learned the ropes of Full Stack Application Development–learning the ins and outs of front-end UI and UX design and development, back end web server development, and writing the glue code to bring together client-server architecture and make full stack applications work end-to-end.

By the age of twenty-five, Jacob had pseudo-mastery of the skills required to realize his twelve-year-old self’s Truest and Purest Dreams. He continued to refine his skillset in his professional career building business application software and helped start an online game development collective known as Comfy Game Dev, teaming up with his best game development friends to compete in semi-annual & annual game jam hackathons such as Global Game Jam, Game Maker’s Toolkit, and Ludum Dare.

The alternative educational coding bootcamp Jacob attended was known as The University of Texas’ Full Stack Web Development Bootcamp powered by Silicon Valley-based Trilogy Education Services, later acquired by 2U, and then by edX.

Attending a coding bootcamp to jumpstart his high tech career is one of the best decisions Jacob ever made.

The Industry Shift

In December of 2024, Jacob was saddened to learn that edX announced the shutdown of all its coding bootcamp programs. This reflects a broader trend: with the scaling back of the software industry and the rise of AI, what was once merely difficult for junior developers is now nearly impossible as companies like Meta, Google, and Apple are offloading mid-level software development to AI systems.

While Jacob understands the massive shift and impact Generative Artificial Intelligence has had on the tech industry, Jacob still strongly feels there is a path to breaking into the industry for newcomers.

The tools have changed, and so the curricula must change as well.

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In a future blogpost, we will explore a much needed revolution in education to help high tech curricula stay on top of all the rapid paced changes seen in both the Full Stack Web Development and AI Development fields.

And, as always, remember to keep reaching for the stars 🚀✨