I quit the park job to become a software engineer. hung up the uniform, said goodbye to the truck and the trails, and told everyone what i was doing, out loud, on purpose, so i couldn't quietly take it back later. a park ranger with a geology degree saying he's off to learn javascript sounds about as believable as a man saying he's off to join the circus, and i knew it, and i said it anyway. the whole thing was a bet on a version of myself that did not exist yet, and i tried not to look at that too directly.

first came the self study year, which nobody puts on the poster. a year (a looooong year) at the kitchen table with the free courses and the tutorials, writing loops that ran forever and functions that returned undefined. learning to code alone is rough because every single error is yours. no weather to blame, no rot in the wood, just you and the cursor and UNDEFINED IS NOT A FUNCTION. some nights i closed the laptop pretty sure i was too old and too outdoor-brained for it. then i opened it back up the next morning, because if the ditch taught me anything it's that you don't have to feel like digging, you just have to dig.

the geology degree saved me, weirdly. a call stack is just stratigraphy (youngest on top). debugging is field work, you walk the system until the layers stop making sense and that's about where the fault runs. data piles up like sediment. I had spent four years learning to read systems too big and too slow to see, and code was the same reading, just small enough to hold in two hands. somewhere around the ten thousandth error message i stopped being scared of it.

then Hack Reactor, which was the self study year run at a full sprint with other people this time. an immersive bootcamp takes your money and your daylight and your weekends and just POURS. days that started before light and ended after midnight. i had been a lot of kinds of tired in my life (chainsaw tired, trench tired) but never brain tired like that, the kind where you close your eyes and see brackets. one night i woke up at 3am because my sleeping brain had found the bug, got up, checked, and it was RIGHT. you learn more in a week than feels legal. strangers turn into comrades. and somewhere in the blur i could suddenly build things. small ugly things held together with hope and console.log, but things, and they did what i told them to.

then the bootcamp shoves you out the door into the job hunt, which is the truly humbling part. applications by the dozen going out and mostly nothing coming back. rejections when they bothered to send one. whiteboard interviews where a stranger watches you think in real time (field camp does not prepare you for that one). the savings going down the whole while, and the 2am voice asking what happens if the version of you that you bet on just never shows up.

it did though. a startup in san francisco that made games you play with your voice, games that lived inside the smart speakers on people's kitchen counters, had an internship open. in january of 2022 they took a chance on a former park ranger with a rock hammer still packed in a moving box and roughly eighteen total months of programming in his whole life. funny thing is, by the time the yes came i mostly believed i could do the job, which was new. i showed up that first morning nervous as hell with no idea what i was in for. probably for the best.