berkough

Right out of high school I began working as a computer repair technician, traveling from home to home and business to business doing on-site repair and troubleshooting. After a few years--but while I was still working--I decided I wanted to do something else so I went back to school and studied political science. I landed a job working for MoveOn during the 2008 presidential campaign. After that I took a job working as a legal assistant for a bankruptcy trustee and was there for 6 years as we worked through thousands of cases which were the result of the 2009 recession. I learned a lot about bankruptcy, finance, and the Federal court systems.

Once the number of bankruptcy cases began to subside I had to find work elsewhere. I took a job working as a compliance officer for an auto finance company, there was some turnover and I became the department head for the IT team as well. Much of my work consisted of writing formal documents; correspondence with customers, regulators, and government entities (such as licensing bodies), as well as writing and maintaining inner-company policy guidelines and manuals. In addition to that though I also maintained the on-site servers and bare metal as well as the proprietary software. During my tenure I spent time writing some scripts to make our workflow more efficient and realized that's more where my interests lie.

Approximately two years ago I took a bootcamp to learn modern front-end web development, but shortly after I completed that program is when all of FAANG decided to lay off half a million people. I've continued learning and playing around with personal projects in my spare time, but after leaving my role as a compliance office, I had to take a job working in the legal sector to continue paying my bills. If the right opportunity arose I would absolutely take it. I still think that the future of the web will depend on decentralized services and collaborative computing.