From Machines to Music to Code: How Jake Transitioned Into Software Engineering

It's not gonna be easy. It's not always gonna be fun, but, you know, if you are passionate and you're willing to take the risks and just go for it, it will pay off, and it's worth it. Hi. So, yeah, I'm Jake, one third of the BlockCode team. So I have a degree in mechanical engineering and then I did audio engineering for about a decade. And, basically, at the end of that, I was looking for, you know, the next thing. I had mechanical engineering degree just sitting there that my family was kinda like, hey. You know, that's still a thing. You know, just engineering in general is really just, like, my passion. The medium seems to matter a little bit less. And so throughout my experience in mechanical and audio engineering, software was obviously, you know, always a part of it. And so it was kind of a natural progression then to go into software development. And then that's when signed up for Fullstack. You know, I came came also not only from an engineering background, but I also own my own business for about five years. A lot of those skills actually were also kind of transferable just especially in the startup world where it was, okay. Like, hit the ground running. You know, there's you gotta just make do with what you're able to actually accomplish and just, like, be willing to pivot and and adapt as you're growing. From my perspective, not just having to, like, learn things quickly, but also just being kind of thrown into the fire and, like, hey. Here's a task, and you need to to build an application for it. Go from there and just build the thing. You'll learn very quickly what's working, what's not, what you like, what you don't like. Like, you can look up beforehand which framework I should use, but until you actually use one of them and feel the, you know, the headaches of it or what's great about it, it's you really don't know, you know, what you're getting yourself into. So that's really been my experience too is like just build things. Don't build them to be perfect. Build them to just get the experience of building. Embrace the unknown, but yeah, just being comfortable being uncomfortable if that makes sense. Like, it's not gonna be easy. It's not always gonna be fun, but, you know, if you are passionate and you're willing to take the risks and just go for it, it will pay off and it's worth it. It's difficult, but it's, like I said, embracing that unknown, getting comfortable being uncomfortable because it doesn't last forever. It that will go away. You will get comfortable.