02/03/2020
featuring Will Johnston
“I’m 19 years into a career in kitchens. I started at 14 and I’m 33. I realized that I wanted to make a career transition out of kitchens and into dev work. Nights and weekends can only take you so far - at some point you really have to put the time in. I’m working on a project called Cbus Fair with Open Columbus. Ultimately, my dream job is designing software as a service industry, just helping out. It’s a wonderful job, it’s extremely creative, but there are parts of it that are really hard. If you’re the entry level guy in a restaurant, you can take a bus to work but you’ve got to Uber home, and you can spend 20% of what you made that night just getting home. I think technology could make the life of people in the service industry better.”
“I’m also working on a personal project, called the Morning Shift, a code-a-thon where, starting Monday, every morning from 7-9 AM, I’m going to be live coding on Twitch doing only new skills to me, really trying to show beginners like myself what it really looks like to start a project. The ultimate goal is to build out a better developer portfolio, and showing the whole process. If I miss a day, I’m making a $100 donation in the name of our highest donor.”
See his project & more at joinhelm.com