Guest Post From Tyler Barstow – Apprenticeship update

Scott wanted me to write a guest post on his blog as the next update on the apprenticeship that he and I cooked up in our secret laboratory. This is that post. Things are going well. I probably should be more descriptive. When I moved down here, I wasn’t sure what was actually going to happen, given that I had very little experience in this kind of work. My internship at Symantec last summer went well and I knew I enjoyed this kind of work, but most of the optimism that that internship could have inspired was tempered by Stu Perkins responding, when I asked him for advice for getting into technology, to “get out while you still can”. Thanks, dude. What did end up happening after I moved down here was:

• I learned programming basics
• I got a job managing the next Henry Kaestner non-profit (Kingdom Technology Foundation. We are looking for a better name, so consider this my shameless call for your ideas)
• I’m drowning in/learning Salesforce. My first real project is due to be demoed for the client next Wednesday or Thursday(depending on their schedule).

In a lot of ways, this apprenticeship has gone better than I expected. I was expecting to still not be making any money and, by extension, living in a tent in Scott’s backyard collecting rain to drink and eating bugs and bark. Instead, I’m making good money (for me) and living in a great apartment with a buddy from college. The thing that should stay at the forefront of your mind when you think about my situation is that I still have a long ways to go. What I’ve taken encouragement from, though, is the reality that people in the technology world do all sorts of things over the course of their career. Scott wrote a couple weeks ago, in his last update, that his expectations for my progress had been unrealistic, and I’ll only add that my expectations were unrealistic as well. I thought I should be able to learn c# in a week and start using it, that I should be able use HTML and CSS to build an amazing website just after finishing the tutorial, and that I should be able to whip Scott in tennis despite never having played a serious game of tennis in my life. And then reality stepped in in it’s matter-of-fact way. This stuff is hard. I’m not stupid, but I’m not a genius, so I’m left to ply my trade in the mass of aspiring, talented-but-not-brilliant twenty somethings trying to matter in the world of business and technology. I’m not in search of the magic bullet or the get-rich-quick opportunity (though I wouldn’t mind getting rich quickly). I am in search of my niche. I don’t know where I’ll end up. Maybe I’ll be touring in a band in a year or giving sailboat tours off the coast of Spain. I suspect, however, that I’ll be sitting at this same desk, doing the same thing or something very different from what I’m doing now, and loving it/trying to be productive in it/trying to be the best at it, which maybe is how everyone hopes they end up.