March 2024.
That's when I wrote my first line of code. Thirty-plus live builds came after it.
The bootcamp I didn't finish
Cheap bootcamp, six weeks, one entry-level developer job at the end of it for whoever came out top of the class.
I made it four weeks and did the math. I wasn't going to be the best student in that room, and I wasn't going to spend another two weeks finding out slowly. So I took the basics I had and left.
That's the part people expect me to be sheepish about. I'm not. Walking was the first real engineering call I made. I looked at the actual return, saw one job and long odds, and put the hours somewhere they compounded instead.
Learning it the hard way
2024 was before AI could code worth a damn. There was no shortcut on offer. If something broke, you sat with it until it didn't.
I tried a few languages looking for one that fit. Java for a stretch. C#, which never clicked. Next.js, which I bounced off early and came back to later. It runs JAYISAAC now.
Then the command line, and that's the one that actually changed things. I stopped hunting for a course that would teach me a language and learned to work in the environment where I could teach myself anything. It's still the sharpest tool I own, and it's why I can pick up something unfamiliar and be useful in it the same week.
Eight hours on one problem
I believe in failure more now than when I started, and not as a motivational line. As a mechanism.
Almost everything I can do came out of sitting with a single problem for eight hours straight, more times than I can count. Nobody reads their way to that. You get it by being stuck, staying stuck, and refusing to leave until you understand why.
Muskeg Lake
Twenty-four pages. Around 23,000 lines. No framework, no build step. Firebase Auth and Firestore behind a role model where the office approves every account by name, a monthly declarations workflow, and an admin console on top.
About fifty hours of my time. I'd budget four hundred for that scope through most shops, and I don't think that's a stretch.
It's also where the job changed. Students depend on that portal. It has to be up on a Sunday night when someone needs their paperwork. Writing code that works on your machine and writing code somebody's week runs on are two different jobs, and that project is where I started doing the second one.
What two years taught me
Pick the tool the problem needs. JAYISAAC runs on Next.js and React because a product with auth, billing and an LLM pipeline earns a framework. Photography by Chan and Tree6z are hand-written vanilla JS, because a booking flow and an instant-quote form don't. A build step there is weight with nothing on the other side of it.
Ship the whole thing. Design, frontend, backend, auth, payments, infrastructure, domain, deploy. Not because solo is virtuous, but because when it breaks at 11pm there's nobody to hand it to, and knowing that changes how you build from the first line.
Get it in front of people. Every site here is live at a real domain serving real users. None of it is a tutorial, a clone, or a repo nobody deployed.
Now
2026. Several AI-integrated apps and Chrome extensions shipped. JAYISAAC AI live and taking payments through Stripe. Plain-English search over verified contacts with the outreach drafted for you. Firebase underneath, an LLM pipeline behind the search, subscriptions and usage limits handled. I built and run all of it.
My repositories are private. I'd rather not publish my source, and a green commit wall isn't evidence of much anyway. The work is public instead. Thirty-odd things live on the internet, four of them on this site, all of them open right now.
I want to go further in this industry and I'm not precious about the shape of it. There isn't much in code I can't do, and the fastest way to find out is to hand me something hard.
The short version
Two years ago I couldn't write a line of code. No degree, no bootcamp certificate, no agency behind me. Thirty-plus live builds and a product taking payments.
The proof isn't a credential. It's everything I've put on the internet, and four of them are one click away.