What is an accomplishment you are particularly proud of?

Like @thediarymaster I am also an Eagle Scout, which I am quite proud of.

Another accomplishment though is my career change. When I graduated college, I had a degree in Communications and a minor in Literature. With that in hand, I sought out a career in advertising as a copywriter. I did that job for almost 8 years. During that time I dabbled in web development. I had a couple clients that I built very simple, static web sites for. It was nice side money along with my full time job.

At one point in in 2006, I decided I wanted to do web development full time. I came to this realization when I was working on someone’s site at 2am not ever realizing how much time had passed. I thought about how many times I counted down the minutes at my full time job until I could leave. Then I said to myself. You should work at a job that you love and where you don’t feel the need to look at the clock.

There was a lot I needed to learn to make this change. I didn’t feel good enough to do web development full time. So I looked for online courses I could take. Between 2006 and 2008 I took 19 courses. Everything from CSS… to JavaScript… to ASP.net… PHP/MySQL… SEO… XML… and various other acronyms… Each course required a text book or 2, homework, projects, quizzes, and a message board for questions you can ask classmates and the instructor. At the end of 2008 I finally felt ready and confident to start looking for a new job in this new career.

In 2009 I took the leap. I left my cushy NJ job of almost 8 years for a brand new job in New York City, a tech startup called KickApps. I applied everything I learned there, and then learned a ton more! I am happy to say I am still in this career, now as a Senior Software Engineer for a large media company. I am happy as hell that I worked hard and made that change. It was probably the best decision I ever made.