About

Congratulations! You’re getting in on the ground floor of my blog! There will be stories galore and possibly pictures, too! Soon there will be enough posts for me to create categories and tags so you can easily navigate, but for now sit back and enjoy the process as it enfolds before your eyes.

My name is Jared. Born in New Jersey, raised in Mississippi, educated in Louisiana, California, and Texas; I’ve had around 25 different mailing addresses and I’m looking for my next one now. Just finished a three month web development bootcamp at The Iron Yard and I’m currently working behind the scenes on my portfolio/resume/cover letter/flossing habits to find work as ruby on rails developer.

I was one of the first people in my family to go to college and have degrees in History from LSU and Cross-cultural Studies from Fuller Theological Seminary. After Hurricane Katrina rekindled my love for the Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in general, I moved back after seminary/grad school to find lots of great people but few avenues to actually use my training. I’ve worked as an Intelligence Analyst, Accounting Manager, Customer Service Rep, and Account Executive on my tour of the low-level white collar work available in much of Louisiana.

About a year ago, I read an article where a person working as a full time developer got his dream job of writing for the New York Times or the New Yorker or… I don’t know. I spent literally tens of seconds trying to find that article to no avail, so the details are sketchy at the moment (look for edits here soon!). He had his dream job in hand, but came back to web development because he had a skill that people wanted to pay him to use. So much so they recruited him back to the world within months of him becoming a freelance writer with real prospects of making it work.

I wish I had a more “inspiring” story about how the angels started singing and I knew life would never be the same. I had that kind of feeling, but it’s hard to explain unless you are a person like me, who pursued a traditional liberal arts educational path and took out exorbitant loans to do so, only to find that the working world could give a flying shit about my degrees. If you are this kind of person and read an article about someone who learned a skill and people thought that skill was great and worth throwing money at, your world changes immediately.

I don’t know if you’ve been out in the world lately, but there are no more good jobs. There are great jobs and crap jobs, but the jobs in between that are OK but offer some sort of job security or great benefits are all but extinct (for more feel-good inspiration watch Larry Smith’s TEDTalk here). I was stuck in one of those jobs that was not great.

I know what you’re thinking: “Wait, why is this all in your ABOUT page???” This blog is inspired by an idea I can’t shake. I have taken a chance on a different educational model where the entire point was to give people a skill so they can find great jobs and by extension change their lives. I have taken the leap, quit my job and have gone without an income for a few months in order to prove that this theory is true. Let’s see what happens, I’m as curious as you are!

If you want to email me: jared [at] jaredwilliams [dot] io