Yeah. So I see. What? How I got to where I am today. That's a big That's a big question. Um, I think all of the experiences we have in our lives kind of shape us good and bad. Um, you know, uh, I think for me specifically. And what What incidents and experience helped shape my career path, it's hard. It's hard to pick out anything that didn't, uh, influence or affect me as I as I kind of have gone throughout my career. But I would say a couple of really important milestones for me where, um, one of the first that I think is directly related Thio to my career and Dev Mountain and others, um was when I in college decided to switch from going into dentistry. Thio studying more about computers at the time. This was back in 2003. Um, Web development was kind of still a bit of a nascent field. It wasn't recognized as at least at least where I was going to school. Doesn't really recognized as a valid or viable career path. But it was something that I got really, really interested in and very excited about, and I didn't e didn't take kind of the traditional route into and to computer software engineering or web development because I wasn't really excited by a lot of the computer science things or the information systems classes. I was just more interested in, like, building websites at the time. And, you know, my wife was convinced that I was going to be a dentist. And I was for a time convinced I was going to be a dentist, A swell. And then, um, you know, came home one day and kind of said, Well, what would you think if I if I didn't go into dentistry? And what if I What if I learned more about this, uh, you know, kind of computers and web development of things like that. And and she was very supportive. I mean, they had a lot of questions, but very, very supportive. And I think it was a really important point for me where, you know, as we talked about it, my wife and I, um, we sort of realized that I would probably be a lot more successful doing just about anything that I was passionate about than doing something that I wasn't fashion about, but even had more of a viable or kind of guaranteed path, right? I could go into dentistry and I could finish dental school, and I could find a practice somewhere, and I'm sure I could be successful financially. But if I was not what I what I was just passionate about, then the chances were much more likely that I would be successful in something that I waas passionate about. And so that was that was a really important moment for me where, um I really believe that chasing something that I that I was passionate about was gonna lead me to success on dso that was, You know that plus all the experiences in learning to code are really important for me, because again, I didn't I didn't really jump into a computer science degree. I didn't jump into an information systems degree. I started just teaching myself and, um, you know, very much, sort of on the job, learning, learning from mentors, talking to people. I did take some classes. I would take a class from one department to take another class from another department and kind of try toe piece together my own education as it were. And that's that's really what got me started in a lot of ways, both as a as a software engineer for almost 10 years of my career. But also having those experiences of learning to code on my own really shaped a lot of my thoughts around how Dev Mountain needed to be structured because I had gone through a lot of the challenges. Um, a lot of the challenges myself, and I and I experienced the pain points. And so I realized that there could be a lot better and faster way to learning to code then Then the way I did. It took me a long time, and I realized that there was probably a better way to do it than the way that I did it. So that was one really important experience. I would say Another important experience was my wife and I joined. Well, you know, my wife and I decided to join a software startup tech startup in in Silicon Valley in San Francisco, and and so we moved our family from Utah to the Bay Area, um, and kind of threw caution to the wind, you know, put it all on the line and jumped into a new venture. And it was It was all of, you know, it was exciting. It was terrifying. It was thrilling. It was frustrating. It was all of the, you know, all those emotions wrapped into one. And it kind of created this really intense, short term kind of learning experience for me, where I really felt like I I leveled up in so many ways. I leveled up Azan, engineer. I leveled up as, um kind of understanding the ins and outs of business. I leveled up in my ability to solve difficult problems, whether those were, you know, architectural problems or whether those were, you know, problems related to growing a business, those kinds of things. And just even though that venture was unsuccessful financially, I came out of that experience with a lot more confidence that I could do anything that I really want wanted to put my mind to write. I felt like from a from a startup or from from an engineering perspective, I just had a lot more confidence in myself and felt like I could you know, I felt like I could tackle the world, right. Um, and it was directly after that when I e was working with another company and they were located in Utah. So actually moved back, uh, to talk with my family. And And that was when I started thinking about, you know, the possibility of creating a coding school. Uh, and at the time, I had no ambitions of it being any more than kind of, Ah, you know, part time program. It was meant to be nights and weekends. And, um, I was planning on continuing to have my full time job and all of that, and those were those were the initial thoughts. But quickly it changed. You know, it changed a bit from that. Another experience in that that I think, sort of helped shape. Where I ended up was that I realized, as I was thinking about Dead Mountain, how much I loved teaching. I love I have been involved many times in seminars and conferences, you know, creating workshops, even all day to day workshops around coding and teaching people how to code. And so I learned a lot in doing that, and I really enjoyed it. And so I realized, as I was thinking about death Mountain that it was kind of the perfect opportunity to combine this educational side of me that I really enjoyed. And the technical side that I really hadn't, um, combined in any major way up until that point. So I would say those were some of the experiences and incidents that really shaped how I got to the point of of Dev Mountain anyway.

so, yeah, this is This has changed a little bit. I'll kind of give you the history of where we started in where it evolved to. But initially we offered a Web development, part time program. So you could you could work a job or you could go to school and then not on nights and weekends you could come into onto our campus and you could learn Web development was our first, our first, of course, or program that we offered. We pretty quickly introduced in IOS. Um, you know, Apple Development Course after that for building APS and for the APP store. And so we had to part time programs on IOS course and a what development course. Um, after that, we ended up also offering a user experience design course part timers. Well, aan den about, I would say, about a year after we started the first, um, the first program, we decided to start offering full time programs because as we as we were noticing, and it just sort of evaluating the programs and students were coming in and doing all these things, they were definitely students that were being successful and able to find employment and able to change their careers, which is really exciting. But we found that the students that were most successful were the ones that had the most time to dedicate to learning. And, um, there were lots of students. Um, there were lots of students in that category and there were also students that you know would work a really intense, you know, full time job and then come to class and they would just be exhausted and they would have very little time to dedicate to learning, learning Web development or IOS or you X. And so we noticed that the people that were able to carve out more time to learning, um, was more successful than the people who didn't have much time. And so it seemed like the right thing tow us that we should kind of build in that time into the program we needed to build in the time so that more people could be successful. And so that's when we started offering full time classes for Web development. We then offered a full time class for IOS Development Way ended up offering a full time class for you ex development as well, or UX design and and and so we kind of shifted from initially being a very part time focused into, um into full time Thean person online piece has been obviously interesting. So we always Well, we started out my goal starting out was to do it in person, learned what I needed to do to be able to do it online. That was kind of my plan was, you know, start teaching these classes in person. And then once I feel like I understood what the curriculum needed to look like and what the pacing needed look like in the structure. Then my plan was to take it online. And, um, the more I did it, the more I was convinced it would be really, really hard to create an effective online program. Um, I I think there are lots of people that that struggle learning an online environments. And obviously, with this year, uh, you don't have a lot of choice. Eso so many programs, including, I believe that Deaf Mountain they've had to pivot to more of an online experience. Um, but at the time I was I was really bought into the idea that in person was much more effective tell people learned in a short period of time. Eso most of the most of the students spent almost all of their time on campus. Some some students would take work home with them, um, in the for the part time class. There was a lot more expected outside of class. So when we were starting with part time, you might spend, I think it was 13 hours or so a week in class, and we wanted you to spend about 20 plus hours total. And so they needed to find, at least in our a day, more or less, to be able to dedicate outside of class to be able to be successful. Now the in person classes again, we sort of change that so that if you were on campus when you were supposed to be on campus thing, you had enough time. Thio put in what it needed, what you needed. Thio be successful, um, so initially are part time Classes were 12 weeks when we first started out. We ended up extending that Teoh 16 weeks, and then we extended it again to try that again, build more time into the program to help people be more successful? Um, the in person classes, um, we're a 12 or 13 week program pretty much most of the time that I was there s so we were able to kind of, you know, regimen the time for those 12 or 13 weeks so that so the students will be able, you know, if they worked hard and really apply themselves, they could be successful in those 12 or 13 weeks full time.

Yeah, that was a really important top. It was really important problem for us because we sort of looked at it is we had to customers, right. We had the students themselves who are paying tuition and making a big sacrifice to, um to be in the program. And the other customers really were the employers off the students, right? If we couldn't, if we couldn't help students to be successful and ultimately become employed Theun, then we weren't gonna be successful as a company. We recognize that early on, and so we knew that we needed to create really relevant courses also, you know, as I was thinking, the whole concept of a boot camp is sort of based on the idea that you teach the relevant information. The stuff that's modern, you know, applicable right now rather than kind of the analogy I used often was, if you're going to learn French, one way you could do it would be to start by learning latin and learn. You know all you can about Latin and the history of Latin and, you know, the, um the linguistics of Latin. All that and then you could learn French, and you would have a basis to learn French. But you could also just start by learning French, right? And sometimes in computer science. That's kind of the approach. Is that a toll east? A lot of higher learning institutions. The approach has been teach students things that air theoretically correct but based in context that that are not applicable to modern day technology similar to teaching somebody grammar in. You know, Latin. Um, and so the whole approach of creating a boot camp was was meant to give students modern day applicable, relevant context to be ableto learn things so you can learn algorithms and computer science fundamentals and concepts while learning Web development. That was kind of the basic idea, and so that was a really important philosophical approach that we took because had we had we done kind of the other way, which a lot of traditional at has done, it would have just taken a lot longer for students to be able to learn first kind of the basics in in theory and then also learn a set of languages and then also have to learn modern frameworks. We kind of skipped right into building and and learning as you go. Um, the process that we followed for that was very, very iterative. So early on in these courses, we would rewrite a significant amount of the curriculum every time we had a new cohort come through. So in a cohort was usually for us about 20 students, maybe 2025 students. And so every time a core would come through, we would we would be very, um, you know, we would be very aware of how the material was received if it was too fast or maybe not aggressive enough if it was covering the right material. If there was parts of the curriculum needed to be updated based on maybe a framework updating itself, like, for example, early on in 2013, when we started angular was a was a very popular front end framework at the time. And so if angular updated something, then we needed also update our curriculum. Eso some. Some of that was based on the industry and the frameworks themselves that we were that we were building on and other things were on very similar things for IOS. By the way, if IOS released a new um you know, when they when they migrated initially from Objective C to Swift, we had to do a complete rewrite of our courses to match that on DSO. We probably followed a very rigorous. I would call it a very rigorous, um, kind of product driven approach to updating our curriculum where again it's kind of contrasting to maybe traditional education, which I've taught at university before. And it za bit easier on the university level to kind of pick a textbook Oh, and create a curriculum. And then they have that be sort of, you know, just there for maybe a year, two years, mawr onda for us. We just couldn't do that. We had we had to constantly updating. And so it was not uncommon for us to rewrite a significant portion of the curriculum from one court to another. Um, as we got better at it and his time kind of went on, there were less pieces that we need to swap out because it was more just we felt really good about pacing. We felt really good about where things were being taught. It was just more of a matter of updating based on, you know, updates in the language or new things that have been released. And so we also would typically one of the ways that we ensured the topics were relevant was we would talk to people in industry so we would have guest lectures come in people that were working in the industry locally. They would come either teach a portion of the class or they would teach, you know, kind of advanced topics. And always we would be asking their, you know, their opinions, their thoughts about the curriculum to make sure that we were up today. And that was really important because early on, that's exactly how you know their input was critical for us to find out what needed to be updated and what wasn't quite up to date. It's also just to mention it's also challenging. It was also very challenging because no matter how relevant and up to date you are again, you gotta remember that that other customer, the employer's right. So if an employer isn't using the latest and greatest technology and your curriculum is built for that, that can create a bit of a challenge right where now the student is coming into an interview and maybe that they're using things that they're talking about, things that the employer hasn't used yet or or hasn't you know, implemented in their code base, Um, so that that was always a challenge to try to keep us really relevant and modern, but also relevant to the employers, because that's that was again really one of our customers there. So it was. It was a bit of a juggling match to try to keep all of those things updated and relevant to the work force.