From EMT to Engineer: App Academy
Aug – Nov 2021
After 2.5 years working through COVID as an EMT and firefighter, I started App Academy's full-stack immersive with no engineering background. The pace was immediate: daily pairing, a cohort of about 30, and 2 exams where scoring below 80% meant expulsion. My path went from toy Ruby programs into Rails — learning the MVC pattern connected to a PostgreSQL database — and from there into JavaScript, which is where I found my footing. 3 months later I'd shipped 3 full-stack apps, each pushing into different territory.
Destiny Plus
A Disney Plus clone: account creation via email, browsing a curated video catalog. Built with React, Redux, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and AWS S3 for media storage. The breakthrough moment was uploading videos I'd cut and edited myself to S3 and wiring them into the UI — first time the app felt real. Setting up infrastructure to seed the database for tests is what first sparked my interest in automation and infrastructure.
Koko
A mental health companion app, built on the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) with a team of 4. I served as Frontend Lead, running team meetings on the app's overall design and theme — my first taste of technical leadership.
Boba Bae
A 2D platformer built with 0 external game engines: vanilla JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3, and the Canvas API, inspired by the Subtle Asian Traits community. It pulled in far more math and physics than I expected — polygon collision, simulating gravity, hand-drawing sprite art — with no framework to lean on.
Play the gameWhat carried over from EMT/firefighter work
Vocalize concerns early. Step into a leadership position when others seem unsure, but know when to back off and let someone else lead. When things get hard, fall back on the systems you built for yourself ahead of time, not improvisation.
Giving back
2 months before I started at Bloomberg, App Academy offered me a 1.5-month teaching assistant role. I helped with lesson planning and unstuck students who were exactly where I'd been a few months earlier — a way to give back to a program that gave me a new career.