Dev Bootcamp Graduation: Address to the 2017 Fiery Skippers
There’s A Fire In Us Skippers
Somebody once told me that there are two risks to voluntary education.
First, the fear that you won’t be able to learn something new.
Second, the fear that you will.
Think back to the day when you plopped down on your couch
to watch Jen Gilbert’s first Ruby video.
If you’re anything like me,
you finished it wondering if you would ever be good enough
to even apply to DBC.
But you interviewed anyway,
somehow you were accepted,
and before you knew it:
You had a GitHub account.
You had a terminal window open on your computer.
You had video chats scheduled with random people all over America.
The students came from everywhere.
From medical research and automotives,
from event planning, photojournalism, cyberinvesting, and sales.
I even paired with a cheesemonger and a real live cowboy!
And nine weeks later, the whole crew arrived on site:
real people.
At Dev Bootcamp, education was no longer something that happened to you.
Education was now a thing that you could do.
And you did it!
You dealt with hashes and arrays, arrays of arrays,
arrays of hashes, hashed passwords,
and those passwords that were never hashed at all.
You learned that being logged out just means you’re not not a current user.
You rode on the back of Penelope’s horses, through groves of oranges, apples, and pears,
kneeled at the boots of Ajax,
and sobbed to Sinatra’s sweet melodies.
You got and you put and you patched and you posted.
And you spent ~100 hours of your life watching the CRUD videos.
From XHR to JSX and ERB to CSS — you were not deterred.
You got to the point where you had many purchased shirts,
through purchases,
source shirt.
Ta-nehisi Coates said:
“It is not the study of language that is hard,
so much as the feeling that your present level is who you are
and where you will always be.”
But today, for once, our present level doesn’t feel like who we are.
The journey does.
Now that we are DBC grads,
we know without a doubt
that what makes good software good
is the ability to change and expand it easily.
What if the same is true of ourselves?
That what makes us good is our willingness to change —
a push to constantly expand.
To become more than we are.
The fiery skipper is our totem after all,
it stretches its wings, fragile and thoughtful,
creating more beauty than it knows.
The future is uncertain, and we’ll never know less than we know now.
Some hopes for us, as we walk towards what’s next:
May we do what we came here to do.
May we can become who we came here to be.
May it be wonderful.
May we strive and stay hungry in the wild fields of our minds.
And may we go on to make beautiful and meaningful things.
Note: I wrote this poem as a graduation address to the 2017 Fiery Skippers at Dev Bootcamp San Francisco. You can watch the livestream here. It starts at 54:30.
