[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.

 [00:07:44] SY: I was going to say, “I don’t know about that one.” I’ve never heard that one.

 [00:07:47] KS: And I remember coding it. And it sounds dumb, but when you can’t pick what to do, just copy other people. That’s a good strategy. You know?

 [00:07:56] SY: So do you feel like there was an advantage to the way you learned to code? Because I think a lot of people, they do it to change careers. They do it with a very specific and explicit intention to get a job in tech as a developer. And there’s a lot of, I think, pressure that comes with that. Do you feel like there was an advantage to you doing it kind of just for fun? You’re doing it for yourself because you were curious because you wanted to build things and see your ideas come to life. Do you feel like you were better off learning in that way? Or do you feel like you would’ve gotten more from it if it was done with a little bit more career intention?

 [00:08:32] KS: I think for me it was definitely the better way to go. For better, for worse, my whole life, I’ve been able to teach myself stuff. Not to be overly personal, but I think a part of that comes from my own father’s like impatience at teaching. If you couldn’t get something right quickly enough with him, he’d get too frustrated to keep teaching you. And so I learned from like a really young age how to teach myself things. And even to this very day, I really fundamentally believe about myself that there is nothing in this world that I can’t learn if I want to. And I feel really lucky in that regard and that both I have that self-belief and also that, frankly, I’ve proven it to myself over and over again. An example would be the music I was doing. I didn’t take lessons. I taught myself how to play all the instruments I played. I didn’t have someone show me how to do audio production. I went and found the stuff to learn how to do it, and I did it. And the same thing with coding. I didn’t have a mentor. I had interest. I had drive. I had the ability to push myself without an outside force. To be fair, I don’t think it’s wrong that people aren’t built that way. I think it’s wonderful if people are a little better at maybe knowing what they want and getting an education for it because it might be a shorter, straighter path. It might be even a happier path. I don’t know. When you teach yourself stuff, there’s loads of frustration sometimes. You don’t even have the language yet to know what you don’t know. So there’s definitely something to be said about having guidance and mentors. But I think at the time too, though, we’re talking 2011, 2012, got my first job in 2013, I think coding bootcamps were just starting. So it wasn’t like it was even on my radar to do stuff like that. And honestly, up until the point in the story that I told you where my buddy tells me to go get a job, I was still convinced I was supposed to do something else. I think it actually worked out really well for me. I think the things I would change is it would be nice to have the opportunity to maybe go back and have some formal training and stuff, just knowing where you are now. Maybe this will come up, maybe it won’t. But for instance, I have a pretty popular course on Egghead on data structures and algorithms and part of why I did the research into that was because of a lack of education, because I didn’t have someone to teach me or a course to go through, and I needed to backfill some of my knowledge. And so that’s what I did. So I think as in all things in software, it depends. I think for me it was good in some ways, but who knows? Maybe I’d be an even greater software engineer. Who knows? I don’t know.

 [00:11:17] SY: So you’ve come pretty far from your ministry and your theology background. I’m curious, are there any learnings, any takeaways from that life that you applied to your current life as a developer?

 [00:11:28] KS: Oh yeah, absolutely. There’s plenty of overlap and I could think of overlap in really two regards. So my degree was a master’s in theology with an emphasis in biblical studies. I spent a lot of time doing essentially literary analysis, like learning how to read passages and break them down to an actual analytical level. I think the biggest thing it taught me was learning to think in context, and I say that as a plural, and it might be hard to hear over the mic. But text at that time, we’re talking ancient text, it wasn’t written in a vacuum. It was written to a particular group of people existing at a particular period of history in a particular place at a particular time. And there were other documents, code text is what we call them, that were going around and circulated at the time. So a lot of time these documents are actually speaking to one another. They’re responding to each other, not unlike subtweets today, right? Like you say something, you’re really saying something else. Learning to think that deeply about things, I see that as only beneficial when it comes to coding because I’m a pretty natural systems stinker. I call myself a forest person and not a trees person. I can see the big picture or I can see how this thing here really affects something there really easily. And there’s another way that they overlap too, though, that I think’s really useful and important is that a pastoral job really isn’t about being theologically astute. It’s about being a good people manager.

 [00:13:11] SY: Really? Interesting. Tell me more.

 [00:13:13] KS: I mean, if you actually think about what a pastor does, sure, they get up every week and they try and say some words to share the gospel or whatnot. And for the record, I’m an atheist now. So I’ve gone full blown. I just want to say that to people. I don’t want people to hear my past and think I’m proselytizing or something. But they get up on Sunday and you think that’s what their job is. But no, what their job really is, is making sure so-and-so is happy about this thing or these people who have been in the church for 40 years, they’re in a tiff right now. How can we smooth things over so that things can go well here and there? Really what their job is, is just managing a lot of expectations, managing people, not in the sense that you’re delegating them to do work, like an engineering manager or a product manager or something like that, but more in the you have a community that you are trying to maintain and keep happy. And it helped me understand a lot more about what it takes to actually write code for a company. So much of our work, once you get beyond some of the base level technical skills that you need is really about managing expectations in people. And sometimes you’re managing up. If you’re an IC, maybe what you’re doing is managing upwards to your manager about deadlines, expectations, et cetera. And I think it gave me a lot of those softer skills that I wouldn’t have had from any other training.

 [MUSIC BREAK]

 [00:14:59] SY: So you mentioned that you have ADHD. Can you explain what ADHD is and how it affects people to those who may not be as familiar?

 [00:15:09] KS: Sure. ADHD is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. But what it really is, is kind of an issue with how the brain maybe processes dopamine, and it can be a little bit different for everybody. There’s different subtypes of ADHD today, things like inattentiveness or hyperactivity or combined, and I’m certainly no expert, but I was diagnosed with it when I was 10. And we didn’t know a great deal of that. That would’ve been almost 28 years ago. I’m getting old. But yeah, I think the way you see it in the media is often as squirrel, like they’re just easily distracted. But I think it’s far different than that. For a lot of people, you often might hear of things like hyperfocus where someone gets really fixated on things. I’ve mentioned a few times like interest is really important. I remember four key things that are important for ADHD people with a little acronym, NICU, just like the hospital wing, but it stands for a Novelty, Interest, Competition, & Urgency. Activities that have those four things are like… they’re things that people with ADHD are really drawn to. And I think part of coding can even kind of do that. If you’ve ever met someone who like just whizzes through something near a deadline, who knows? They might have it. In undergrad, I wrote 75 of my 92-page thesis, my senior thesis, in the last 30 hours before it was due.

 [00:16:42] SY: Wow! Oh goodness!

 [00:16:43] KS: And yes, if that doesn’t tell you I had a problem. But urgency does it. And I think when it comes to like work, I think there are both positives and negatives with it when it comes to like working in tech. I think the positives are if you find something interesting, you’re probably going to quickly become an expert in it, just the way your brain is wired and how you go about learning things. But I think some of the other challenges are, and like ones that I’ve struggled with, often in my career is like getting put on things that I have zero interest in, getting re-orged in a company onto something of no importance to me. That can be really difficult. If you don’t have control or autonomy over that and you get put on something you have no interest in, good luck. You’ve probably heard of executive function before. Maybe your audience has, but that’s really like having the energy to start a task. And people with ADHD can often really struggle with getting tasks started. You’ll look at the task as if you’re neurotypical, you’ll look at it and be like, “Oh, just get started. It’s easy.” But I think a good way to think about it is like for someone with an executive function problem, it’s like they’re staring at a giant wall that they’re going to have to climb just to even get going. And that can be really tough. Yeah. I’ve definitely gone through my share of reorgs that put me in situations that were, we’ll just say suboptimal. So. yeah.

 [00:18:15] SY: Yeah. That makes sense. How would you say the ADHD impacted your learning? You are teaching yourself how to code, the French press in the morning, like those days. How did it most impact the first part of you learning how to code?

 [00:18:30] KS: I mean, it’s a superpower for me. If I’m interested in it, I’ll just gobble up everything I can about it. YouTube videos weren’t really big in the day, but there were plenty of blogs I could find, or I burned through a bunch of courses on Codecademy, which was free at the time. I think if I redid it today and then like the same thing happened, it would be probably like freeCodeCamp, would be the thing I would burn through. I think the other thing is like for me, I really need routines to be successful. And so that just happened to work out. It was a time in my day that I’ve always kind of been really fresh and able to think and focus clearly, and it just kind of lined up with an opportunity to practice something interesting. So I don’t know how to say it, but I got really lucky. It might be more difficult for other people if they don’t have control over their time. But for me, at that period of my life that was, I don’t know, it just worked out. I’ve never shied away from telling people I got pretty lucky to change careers.

 [00:19:31] SY: And did you find ways to manage any of the downsides of that ADHD?

 [00:19:35] KS: I mean, caffeine certainly helps. So I have not been medicated for a long time and I’ve considered going back on it recently because I think medication can be a huge help for people. I think some people it might be just the thing that helps them accomplish their goals. And I don’t think people should be afraid to use whatever tools are available to them. But yeah, I’ll say it this way. The one challenge of having many interests is you have many interests.

 [00:20:06] SY: Right.

 [00:20:07] KS: You end up with like a lot of things that get started. People might not know this, but we don’t get dopamine from finishing something. We get dopamine from the anticipation of something. And so if you’ve already started it and you’ve had that thrill of like, “Oh, I’m anticipating building this great app and this great thing and this blah, blah, blah, blah,” and you’ve already built enough of it that you’ve already done the part that makes you excited, well, it’s really easy to abandon it. Or it’s really easy to grow tired of something, even though you really should stick it out and finish things. So I’d say that’s been a challenge and that’s not just coding. We all have our domain names that we haven’t put something on or projects that we started and didn’t finish. For me, even musically, I probably have on this computer here, 300, 400 songs that are like only half done because I’ll get started and I just won’t like it enough to finish or something like that. So that’s probably the biggest challenge.

 [00:21:04] SY: And what is helpful for people to know who may not have ADHD but might be working alongside someone, working in a team with someone who has it? What’s something that’ll be helpful for the rest of us to know and understand about that situation?

 [00:21:18] KS: Gosh. I love that question. Thank you for asking it. I think there are a few things that are useful to keep in mind. I’m going to highlight two. The first one’s kind of a bit odd, but one of the things that I think a lot of people with ADHD or maybe are AuDHD, if they’re on the autism spectrum as well, this might play in as well, but they might have some emotional dysregulation issues. And what I mean by that is when I experience something, I often joke with people that if you could picture like a dial, like maybe a guitar amp dial or something, normally there’s the tenths that go from 1 to 10, and I feel like mine only has like 1, 4, and 11. I experienced things quite wildly. And because my brain is thinking so quickly and so rapidly and so often, I can jump from, you might be going from A to B, but I’ve already logically thought through A, B, C, D, E, F, G in an instant. And so now I’m at an emotional state that doesn’t vibe or resonate with someone I’m interacting with. And I think in the workplace that can be really challenging. And it’s not like I’m trying to respond a particular way. It happens so fast. It’s really hard to do anything about. And I think one of the downsides is, I don’t know how else to put it, but you think children are like impetuous, so you just teach them like, “Oh, you’ll grow out of it.” But people with emotional dysregulation, they might not ever grow out of it. I’m not saying that’s childish or anything. I’m saying their brain is intense and you can’t understand how intense something feels to their brain. So if you see someone having maybe a disproportionate reaction to something, you might want to take a pause and ask, like, “Maybe they’re experiencing this different than I think they should be.” [00:23:10] SY: And how should we handle that situation? When we come across a situation where someone might feel emotionally dysregulated, what is the right response? How do we handle that?

 [00:23:20] KS: Probably don’t amplify the situation, but I don’t know that I have a great answer. I think part of the way, like I’ve managed in my own career, if this helps other people, is like I’ve worked on putting myself on teams in situations where that’s not as much of an issue. I’ll give an example. I’ve worked from home since before the pandemic. I’ve worked from home now six years, and part of that is not just because I don’t like commuting, but part of it is like I can have whatever emotional response I want here, and people in an office don’t need to hear it. And we’re not just talking about the WTFs that you’re going to maybe say while you’re trying to debug some code. When someone says something in a meeting that I don’t know that I have an example off the top of my head, but I’m just thinking of times where it’s been like definitely helpful to be in my environment rather than be in an office in how I respond. But I think for other people, I just think we need to be a bit more curious and less judgmental in that regard. I mean, if you see someone do something odd, I think it’s really unfortunate that we jump to say a judgment of like, “Hey, that person really responded poorly, they must be messed up,” versus, “I wonder why,” and you could probably ask them. And I think you would probably get an insight. I didn’t plan to talk about this, but people with ADHD often have what’s called justice sensitivity. If they’re upset about something, there’s probably something deeper there that maybe you’re not catching. Maybe an injustice, maybe a slight of some sort. They could be barometers in your environment and you just don’t know. And that’s kind of what I meant by making my work work for me. I’m a platform engineer. My job is to find frictions that are happening at like a systems level for the front-end people at my company, and build tools or libraries or find solutions that remove those at that higher level. And so I don’t have perhaps the pressures of normal product work. And I think that really helps me in terms of being able to… when I see something that’s, it sounds silly, but an injustice, like something as silly as like… recently I realized like some of our builds were taking like over a minute for just a front-end change. And I was like, “This can’t be.” And me and a teammate, we set off to do some work and make that better. I don’t know. I think we’re all given the brain we’re given or the cards were dealt. And for better or for worse, you got to find a way to maybe make it work to your strengths. I don’t like to think of it as being a disorder or anything like that. This is how I’m wired. What can I do to make it the best I can for me?

 [00:26:08] SY: Absolutely. Coming up next, Kyle talks about luck and hard work after this.

 [MUSIC BREAK]

 [00:26:33] SY: What is one thing you want listeners to remember to take away from this interview?

 [00:26:37] KS: I think one thing I want people to take away from this is we all need a little bit of luck. I said that word a few times before. I think for people like your audience 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. And I know it sucks to rely on something out of your control, but I think there can also be a bit of peace in that, and that 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 in your life, and you’ll be ready for that chance when luck turns your way and it will. I can’t guarantee it for everybody, but it just takes one chance. I got that one chance 10 years ago and my whole life has changed in so many ways for the better because of that. And I think all success stories need a little bit of that and I just wish they would acknowledge it a bit more. So that’s my thing.

 [00:27:57] SY: Now at the end of every episode, we ask our guests to fill in the blanks of some very important questions. Kyle, are you ready to fill in the blanks?

 [00:28:04] KS: Yes.

 [00:28:05] SY: Number one worst advice I’ve ever received is?

 [00:28:09] KS: Just ignore the bullies.

 [00:28:10] SY: Oh, interesting. Okay. Tell me about that.

 [00:28:13] KS: I may be a popular Twitter person now, but most of my childhood I was not well liked by anyone. And part of that has to do with not understanding my neurodivergence and stuff like that. But as a kid, I was, I mean, not to trauma dump on your audience, but I was pretty incessantly bullied and everyone was just like, “Just ignore them. They’ll get tired.” But guess what? Bullies never get tired. They just keep coming. You have to be more creative than that. And I think that is such a passive and disempowering way to explain that to a child. And so, yeah, when I saw that question, I was like, “Yeah, that is easily the worst advice I was ever given.” Find ways to be active. And if you have power to help people, help people.

 [00:29:06] SY: Number two, best advice I’ve ever received is?

 [00:29:09] KS: It’s sometimes better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

 [00:29:13] SY: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. When does this apply in your coding journey? I’m curious.

 [00:29:17] KS: You know, honestly, sometimes there’s a new technology or a new thing that is just a better way to do the job.

 [00:29:24] SY: Yeah.

 [00:29:24] KS: And you’re not going to be able to convince certain people. So I don’t know. Maybe it’s probably harder to do these days. There used to be a time where people maybe didn’t do pull request reviews for every code change in code bases. But I think maybe a good way to do it is rather than ask if you can do something, go make a proof of concept and be able to show them what to do first. If you’re waiting for people to understand the idea in your head and they can’t get it, just go build it.

 [00:29:56] SY: Right. Good one. Number three, my first coding project was about?

 [00:30:01] KS: I honestly can’t remember.

 [00:30:02] SY: No?

 [00:30:03] KS: Yeah. But I can remember like the first thing that stands out.

 [00:30:07] SY: Okay.

 [00:30:07] KS: And so it’s really silly, but I had seen a clock. It sounds really weird. I had seen a clock that the whole thing was like a big rectangle of like lines that were rotating. And they would rotate in such a way that they would tell the time and they would all spin at different rates, but such that they always happen to line up like every five seconds or something like that to tell you what the time was. And so I went and built something like that with HTML, CSS, and jQuery. But instead of a clock, I had it say words like create, make, try, I don’t know, stuff like that.

 [00:30:42] SY: Yeah. Yeah.

 [00:30:43] KS: And it was just meant to be like this experiment in, “Can I learn?” At the time, it was like some jQuery animations and stuff like that. And so I don’t know. That stands out to me as like one of the first things I remember because I remember showing it to Pete, who I mentioned earlier, and getting the nod of approval of like, “That doesn’t do anything useful, but to me it shows you got skills.” So I was like, “I’ll take it.” [00:31:08] SY: Very cool. Number four, one thing I wish I knew when I first started to code is?

 [00:31:13] KS: Oh, why testing is important. I kind of had it wrong when I was early in my career. I foolishly made the joke of like, “Why would I write tests if I’m smart enough to like write the code correctly?” And what I’ve kind of grown to learn as I’ve gotten further in my career is like tests aren’t just about like proving that something works right. It’s a way to check your work as you go and verify your assumptions and even find assumptions that you’re making and didn’t realize. So I think for me, I wish I would’ve learned testing earlier in my career. And I think, not that I’m a TDD advocate or anything like that, but just the ability to think through. I mean, think about how wonderful it is that with computers we can actually verify that they do what we expect them to do. Like you can’t do that with art or something like that. But with computers, you can have some input and check the output. And so for me, learn how to test earlier than I did.

 [00:32:18] SY: Very cool. Well, thank you again so much for joining us, Kyle.

 [00:32:21] KS: Thank you so much for having me.

 [00:32:26] SY: You can reach out to us on Twitter at CodeNewbies or send me an email, hello@codenewbie.org. For more info on the podcast, check out www.codenewbie.org/podcast. Thanks for listening. See you next week.