100 Days of Swift: Day 5

 DONE!

100 Days of Swift: Day 4

 DONE!

100 Days of Swift: Day 3

 DONE!

100 Days of Swift: Day 2

 DONE!

100 Days of Swift -- Day 1

Two Rules:

Rules

If you want to make a success of this course, there are only two rules:

1. Every day you spend one hour reading or watching Swift tutorials, or writing Swift code.

2. Every day you post about your progress to the social media site of your choosing. Tell people!

I’ll be providing all the material you need to follow along, so all you need to do is show up ready to learn.

So, I am posting here to my blog that I am going to start AND finish this course in 100 days: August 4, 2021

Day 1

Let's Go! 

I Am Learning Swift!

 I decided to further my technical skills, and learn the Swift programming language.

Why?

Because I have always loved the Apple ecosystem, and let's face it -- their app store is not going anywhere anytime soon, and the job market for iOS software engineers is aplenty. I want to position myself to be able to pivot back to an engineering role at some point in my life especially with all that is going on in the world.

Continuing Education

I think it is really important for people to keep learning, and feed that hunger (did someone say snack???). I love technology, and I like building things. I always have ideas on how to make things better, or improve on existing things, so why not put money where my mouth is? Time to take action.

Resources

Another reason there are no excuses to learn anything you want these days it the shear amount of resources (often times FREE!) available. Ever heard of YouTube University? Yeah I have a Masters from there.

Another reason is that a good friend of mine is a iOS software engineer at Square, and having someone who can help/mentor you is an amazing thing to have!

A great resource is also Reddit -- yes, I said it, Reddit -- here is the link to the subreddit for Swift (go to the FAQ, and see the consolidated list of great resources that I found including the course I plan to take, as well as the free e-books that Apple provides.

Which One?

I decided to take this course first:

100 Days of Swift by Paul Hudson (FREE!)

2 Years Later...

A Look Back:

Initial Plan

Time really does fly! So, I moved to Silicon Valley in March 2019 in hopes of getting knee deep into the world of startups. I only knew a few people in the area, so I packed my car and drove down. 

My first few months I spent getting to know the general area, and figuring out where to meet people (other than on LinkedIn). My first thought was to create an app for my iPad that would get people to interact with me, and drive Uber/Lift in areas around Palo Alto / big corporate HQ's.

Meanwhile, I joined the likes of cofounderlab.com, and other sites to try and network with other like-minded folks. I met with a few people with early stage startups, and it was a great experience. What I realized is MOST people have no clue what they are doing. There is a reason why MOST startups fail -- 9 out of 10, probably?

Ripcord

I was initially planning on working with my buddy who runs an AI company, but my skillsets did not match any of his openings so I started searching for jobs at funded startups that were still in that PMF (product-market-fit) stage. As someone with an engineering education, and wanting to learn the business side of startups I figure the best place to be would be on the sales engineering side of the house. I found a great opportunity at a well-funded company called, Ripcord. I was their first sales engineer and their sales org was very nascent. Perfect timing!

COVID-19

Fast forward 12-14 months, and enter a little thing called COVID-19, and our startup decided to eliminate most of direct sales roles in the company, which included my position. This was a blessing in disguise, as I was already looking to go somewhere else. After they laid me off -- OUCH MY EGO! -- I was just relaxing, and really taking my time to figure out my next move. Remember, my goal here is to learn the startup game at other's expense, and soak in the do's and don't's of building a company from scratch. In the background I was always networking, meeting people, building relationships, and learning about startups on the side.

I always have ideas and even started pitching VC's for seed funding of something I wanted to pursue. Again, COVID-19 squashed those hopes and dreams. Better to fail early!

Silver Lining

After months of talking to various startups, and even considering joining one of the many 'Evil Corps' here in the valley, I found an opportunity that would not have been possible if not for the pandemic. You see, when the pandemic hit companies started to realize, not by choice, that remote working was not only viable, but here to stay. The opportunity was at a company called BlackSky, a geospatial intelligence solutions startup that was fundraising for the scaling part of their business. The sales engineer before me had left to go pursue other opportunities, and I fit their culture perfectly.

So far it's been great, and my risk paid off as BlackSky is now going public through a SPAC merger with Osprey Technology Acquisition Corp ($SFTW) and will raise enough cash to fund our 16-satellite constellation.

Stay Tuned....