S23:E5 - Going from Ministry to Tech (Kyle Shevlin)

In this episode we sit down with Kyle Shevlin from Virta Health, who talks to us about his journey from ministry into tech. Kyle is a senior software engineer (JavaScript, React, and more) who spends his free time golfing, woodworking and playing video games. Hear as he describes his experience with ADHD in the workplace. Show Links Partner with Dev & CodeNewbie! (sponsor) Justice Sensitivity ADHD jQuery From Pastor to Programmer

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[00:00:05] SY: Welcome to the CodeNewbie Podcast where we talk to people on their coding journey in hopes of helping you on yours. I’m your host, Saron, and today we’re talking about going from ministry to tech with Kyle Shevlin, Senior Software Engineer at Virta Health.

[00:00:18] KS: For people trying to learn coding and change careers and find a new job, there’s only so much that’s going to be in your control, and there’s going to be a lot of forces that aren’t in your control. If you’re doing everything you can, then at the end of the day, you can feel happy and proud about the effort you’ve put in, the work you’re doing to improve yourself and your life.

[00:00:43] SY: Kyle talks about his journey into code, his experience living with ADHD, and how a team can best work with a colleague who may have ADHD after this.

[MUSIC BREAK]

[00:01:00] SY: Thank you so much for being here.

[00:01:01] KS: Thank you for having me.

[00:01:03] SY: So you initially were in ministry. You were a pastor for almost 10 years. I feel like it’s a very, very different job from coding. And you also have your masters in theology. How did you transition into tech?

[00:01:13] KS: Yeah. It’s kind of a bit of a long story. I’ve written about it on my blog. For anyone that eventually wants to read the written details, it’s a post called “From Pastor to Programmer”. But the shortest version of it is I was in grad school and my buddy who was in tech before he did ministry, and now he kind of does both, he posted a course that he had put together for Codecademy, which at the time, this is 2011 or so, was pretty darn new. Like code bootcamps hadn’t really sprung up and stuff like that. They were just about to. And he posted this on his Facebook wall, if you can remember still using that back in the day. And I took the course and I thought, “Oh, hey, this is kind of neat.” And I just kind of kept doing it. Eventually realized I had some use cases for code. I was playing music and I needed like a website, but I was broke. I was in grad school and I couldn’t afford anyone to build it for me. So I had this coding thing I had started to learn. I was like, “Maybe I can build a website.” And eventually I did. I was able to like put together a WordPress site or something like that back in the day. And yeah, it just kind of worked. And for the actual transition, I eventually finished my degree and my wife and I moved up to Portland to kind of start our life together and try a new city. And I was still pursuing pastoral roles at the time, but I was struggling to find a new role. The truth is my theology was becoming more and more progressive and people who know the Christian Church well would probably not be surprised to hear that conservative churches have more money than progressive ones. And so that means there’s more jobs. And I’m not a conservative. I never have been. Never will be. And I couldn’t find work. And I got lucky. One day I was talking to someone about like, “Hey, I can’t really find work. I’m not sure what to do.” And they asked me about some of my other interests and I’m like, “Well, I write code. I’ve been doing it like every day for a year and a half, but that’s just for fun.” It really was. I had never thought about it as a career ever.

[00:03:21] SY: Really?

[00:03:22] KS: Not even remotely. I was just like kind of just doing it to learn it. I don’t think I had it in my head that you had to go to school to do it, but it just hadn’t dawned on me that like this was an option. And they’re like, “Oh, that’s interesting. I know a couple web developers. Why don’t you meet with this guy Pete and have a conversation with him?” And so Pete invites me to a coffee shop here in Portland and we meet up and I show him like what I’ve built. And I’ll paraphrase because the words he used were sensible, but he basically told me, “Kyle, go get a job.” And then I got lucky one more time in the sense of, this was at a time when I think the bar to entry was pretty low. I probably, at the time, knew a good amount of HTML, a pretty decent amount of CSS and was just starting to learn jQuery. I don’t even know if your Code Newbies know what jQuery is, but it was a big deal back then.

[00:04:20] SY: That was the thing back then. Yeah.

[00:04:22] KS: And yeah, I knew a little bit of that. In two months, I was able to land my first job at an agency here in Portland, shout out to FINE. It was a good place to start my career at, thrown in the deep end. I worked on like I’m not joking, even 80 different projects my first year because they just had loads of clients that needed updates and maintenance and stuff like that. So good training grounds.

[00:04:44] SY: That’s exciting. So if you were not coding every day to get a job, what were you coding every day for? What was the end goal? Was it truly just a hobby or was there some other goals, some other aspiration you had tied to it?

[00:05:01] KS: You know, I think I still had enough things that I wanted to build that it kept me going. Not necessarily like a business. I’m not a strongly entrepreneurially minded person, but I’ve just always wanted to build what’s in my head. In fact, coding to me to this very day, that’s the point still. It’s not to go make a bunch of money or start a business or something. To me, really the fundamental thing that still makes me interested in coding at all is like how can I build the things that are in my head. And it doesn’t have to be code. I mean, one of my hobbies is woodworking, and part of that is how do I build the things that are in my head. So yeah, I think part of it was, if I’m being honest, I was working three different part-time jobs trying to make ends meet while I waited for my wife to finish grad school. I was a janitor. I was a ghostwriter for a blog and some other random things. I’m just trying to piece these things together. And honestly, I think for me, it was really just like, “This is something interesting for the ADHD people out there.” Interest is like super important to us. If we’re not interested in it, we can’t do it. But I was interested in it and I think it gave me routine, to be honest. I can still remember. I would wake up in the morning, I’d make breakfast, my wife would head to work, and I would make, at the time we only had a French press to make some coffee. I don’t mean that to be snobbish. I mean like we didn’t have a coffee maker. We had some cheap Ikea French press. And I would make the French press and I would code until I’d finish the coffee in the French press. And so that would take me like an hour, hour and a half or something like that. And that was just the routine. That’s just what I would do. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just picking random stuff in my head to make. Or if I couldn’t think of that, what I did was, I’ve told this before to some people, there was a woman at the time. Her name is, Jennifer DeWalt. Her website’s still up, JenniferDeWalt.com, but she made 180 websites in 180 days back then.

[00:07:04] SY: I remember that. Did she still do that?

[00:07:07] KS: I don’t know. I don’t think so.

[00:07:09] SY: I totally remember that. Yeah. That’s really cool.

[00:07:12] KS: It was cool and what it gave me was back then you could still inspect the page. You could inspect the page and see what they had actually written and maybe even see the JavaScript or the jQuery they had written. So I would see some projects she had made. I would just pick like a random one of the websites she made, and I would try and reverse engineer it and then check my work. Like I could remember specifically one of her first ones is the Monty Python problem. No, Monty Hall problem, sorry. Yeah, that’s funny. I hope you keep that in.

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