S2E3: Learning to Code at a Young Age with Avi Flombaum

Laurence:
Hey, it's Laurence Bradford. Welcome to Season 2 of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, where I'm chatting with people who taught themselves how to code and are now doing amazing things with their newly found skills.

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Hey listeners, welcome to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I'm your host Laurence Bradford. In today's episode, I talk with Avi Flombaum, founder and dean of the Flatiron School. Avi learned how to code at a very young age. In our conversation today, he talks about teaching himself, leaving college to pursue a full-time career, the origin story of Flatiron School, and much more. Remember, you can get Show Notes for this episode plus a full transcript at learntocodewith.me/podcast. Enjoy!

Hey guys, here I am with Avi. Avi, thank you so much for hanging out with me today.

Avi:
No problem, glad to be here Laurence.

Laurence:
So, could you just kind of start out by introducing yourself to the listeners?

Avi:
Sure. I'm one of the co-founders of the Flatiron School. We're an in-person and online vocational school for people that want to become developers. We started around 4 1/2 years ago, based out of New York. It's been a lot of fun getting people jobs and teaching them how to code.

Laurence:
Awesome, yeah, I'm so excited to have you on because you have a really unique story. I was actually reading a bit about you before the podcasts, some older interviews you did. Probably not everyone knows this but you began learning at a really young age, how to code, right?

Avi:
Yeah, I remember starting to pick up HTML and some basic programming around 4th or 5th grade.

Laurence:
Wow. Do you, I know that maybe your memory's not great, I know mine's not that great from back then, but do you remember kind of what led you to even learn initially?

Avi:
Yeah, I remember pretty explicitly. One, my mom was a teacher at my elementary school and she would tutor kids after school and I would have to basically wait at school for her to be done. The school had one computer at that point, maybe another one in the library. I remember there was one in the mezzanine where the teachers used to hang out and I would sit there and play with the computer after school.

Computers back then weren't exactly user friendly, so you'd turn them on and all you'd get was like a blinking green prompt. You kind of learned there was some kind of built in games into the operating system and one of them was like Nibbles, where it was like a snake and you're eating these boxes and you get longer and bigger. I kind of figured out how to beat the game and I found a file that was the source code of it and I opened it and at the top of the file was all these variable declarations like 'Speed=10.' I kind of thought to myself, 'well, what if speed equals 100?' So then the game was way faster. That was kind of the first time I realized that software's malleable.

But generally I really loved computer games and when you buy your six floppy disc set of King's Quest and you're trying to install it in DOS on a Windows machine in like 1994, again, you kind of have to understand a little bit about what a file system is and what a command prompt is and what installing something means. So the computers weren't something super easy to use and you had to be sort of a hobbyist and get a technical fluency that we take for granted today. That's kind of how I started getting technically fluent.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so interesting because I can only imagine, you really were learning from doing, right? You didn't have a book or anything that you were learning from.

Avi:
At that point I didn't have a book. What started happening is I was kind of, I always played the computer a lot and my parents and my parent's friends identified me as "Oh, you're a computer geek." So they would start, as I got a little older, I remember for my birthday or holidays or things like that, I started getting these weird computer books. I remember I got Tom’s Hardware Definitive Guide How to Build Your Own Computer. It was this massive, 600-page hardcover book. They kind of talked about what a CPU is and a motherboard and RAM and hard drives and all those kind of components. I remember that book.

Then I remember also, my parent's friends, we had this one neighbor like a block away, his son was friends with my brother, his dad was a programmer and I'd go over to hang out with my brother and his friend and I'd end up hanging out with his dad and he'd show me what he did. I think he was some sort of DBA or something.

So that kind of helped a little bit. It was really once I got to 7th and 8th grade that I got a little more serious about it and actually started going after books and trying to find books to read on programming and things like that.

Laurence:
Yeah, wow. So, throughout high school then you continued kind of dabbling and doing things with computers?

Avi:
Yeah, and I remember, the big moment was like when the first time I really signed onto the internet. I don't know if it was the first time, but there was a moment when I realized what the internet was and I was like, "Man this thing is going to be giant, I want to build this." Then I was trying to get serious about it.

I wanted to be a computer expert. Whatever that meant. I didn't really know yet, but I figured out that there was something called NetSuite or Dreamweaver (5:50) that would let you layout web pages without knowing programming or HTML. The problem was the markup they generated was, or like if you wanted to change something that the program, the WYSIWYG or the GUI didn't support, you couldn't do that. Whenever I was editing in like NetSuite or Dreamweaver in like 7th or 8th grade, you export the site you designed as something called HTML. And again, kind of the same way I opened up the source code for Nibbles, I just opened up those files and I was like, "Well, there are two things here, there's learning how to use Dreamweaver, or there's learning whatever Dreamweaver is making. It seems like one of them is a real permanent thing and the other is just software."

So I decided then, in 8th grade, to just learn HTML. What I did was, I built the website for my community center, the YMHA, which was like riverdaley.org in 8th grade and I built it for them for free to trade for dial up because we couldn't have dial up at home. Basically, because they needed a web host, you get a free dial up account to access your web server. I asked them if I could use that from my house, too. They said, "Sure, just build us this website."

Laurence:
Wow, that's amazing. It sounds like you were very industrious growing up.

Avi:
Yeah, I always used to try and sell my baseball cards, running a lemonade stand, things like that.

Laurence:
Building the website for the community center in the 8th grade. I think that's the earliest I've heard an example of freelancing. I know some people who would do it maybe in high school, building websites for some extra money, but 8th grade, that's definitely quite young. Okay, so then I know from doing some research on some other things, I know you went to college, could you remind me where that is again?

Avi:
University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Laurence:
Okay, great. You didn't study computers through, right?

Avi:
No, I would say that I studied nothing, but the majors I was trying to declare were creative writing and film.

Laurence:
Okay, so how did that kind of happen? What you were telling me from elementary school through high school, it sounds like you had this deep passion for doing things with computers but then you ended up studying something completely different.

Avi:
I also had a deep passion for movies and creative writing. I think that the nature of software is expression and so it shares more with things like storytelling and weaving narratives and especially like editing and montages and remixing, than I think people give it credit for. I don't see a huge delta between my love of writing fiction and making things up and my love of writing software.

Laurence:
So when you say movies, do you mean like movie editing or like film, like the study of film?

Avi:
I think the study of film theory is very much the study of editing and composition and narrative. I think those are the tools and mechanics of the medium itself. I did want to make movies and I learned how to cut film on a bolex and edit and things like that, you know, use a non-linear editor like Avid and stuff. So I'd make little movies throughout high school. I knew how to use a camera. The production of it was interesting to me, but more interesting to me was the theory of it, just film theory, right? Why do we like movies this way and you know, what is the nature of the medium and how do we tell or evoke emotion or experience through this.

Laurence:
Got it. So after college, what was kind of your next move after that?

Avi:
So throughout high school, around when I was like 16, I got a little more serious about programming and started working for startups in the city during the summer, after class for work study senior year. So I was kind of like already getting paid to program and that's when I also started just finding and stealing and reading books as much as possible. So I kind of was pretty voracious about teaching myself things and the internet had begun evolving.

So there was a website like Web Monkey or something and W3Schools. While there wasn't Stack Overflow, there were starting to be free resources online that you could learn from. There was a very active, let's call it a hacker community in IRC which I was pretty into that also, between my friends in IRC and things like that and those communities and the books and the websites, I started getting a better understanding of how software works, how it's developed, what are the different components and systems, the architects and things.

When I got to college, I started doing some really light web design or web work, freelance work for this hedge fund. I basically made them their homepage. The CEO and I got along and he then asked me if I could make, remember when you had a Windows CD and you could put it in a computer and it would, some of them would auto load a program, just start up? They had this investment management software, they were trying to download a conference and they wanted it so that when you put in the CD it just started. I remember that's like an autoload.ini file, you have to burn onto this CD, additionally that tells Windows what to do when the CD is inserted. So I just wrote them one and he liked that. I also made a CD stamp for them so they could knock it out, those unlabeled burnt CDs but rather, let's make a stamp on it and put a logo, I made the stamp myself. I was never really good at design but they didn't care. They just liked that I was doing more than was asked of me.

Throughout college, my freshman year they would constantly throw me these odd technical jobs. Some were related to programming, they knew I could do more than that, than HTML and CSS and design and auto loading CDs. One day the CEO called me and it was toward the end of my freshman year and was like, "Okay, we want to build this program to invest in lawsuits and we need to be able to predict when a lawsuit is going to settle and for how much, based on some variables and not accidents. Then we need to be able to manage the flow of these lawsuits and get police reports and medical reports and talk to their lawyers and things like that and track the investments. Do you do that stuff also?" That's what he asked me. And I remember being like, "Sure, yeah, I do that stuff!" And he was like, "Why don't you find a ComSci major at Wisconsin and come up with a pitch. You know what we're building." I'd been around that summer so I'd seen what they were working on, their investment pieces and I was like, "Sure, I'll do that." So luckily my best friend in college, my roommate, was a ComSci major and told him, "Hey, we get a free trip to New York if we just come up with some pitch. Who cares if we even get the job?"

They flew us out to New York and I'd written out this massive spec, it's going to automate faxes and when we receive a fax it's going to be automatically associated with the case, so we don't need intake staff and we'll use LexisNexis and Westlaw to make these predictions on lawsuits. Just kind of wrote out this giant dream. And he's like, "This sounds great, how much is it going to cost?" And I remember that was a pivotal moment, because I really had to like say the biggest number I could come up with. So I was like, "$12,000." And he was like, "Done."

Then I went back to school and it was the beginning of sophomore year and I was basically just writing code all day and I barely made a dent in the software. I got really nervous, because I was not going to class. I was dropping or getting incompletes or failing them. I called him and I was like, "Jack, I can't do this. I'm not doing well in college right now. I'm giving you your money back, I haven't spent any of it, but I can't do this." He was like, "Avi, you can't leave me like this. I made promises to investors, I've got this whiz kid in Wisconsin building this program. You don't have to give me everything you promised me, but just give me something so I don't look stupid." So I basically boiled the program down to this simple prediction model and a very simple work flow. And I just built it, just brute forced it, just 20 hours a day. I showed it to them in the winter and they really liked it. They were like, "This is great, we'll take it." Started using it. They called me two months later and were like, "Yeah this is pretty good, you want another $12,000 for coming here in the summer and building more?" I was like, "Sure." So I worked there the summer in between the sophomore and junior year. I went back junior year and like three weeks later they're like, "Hey, why don't you just come back and drop out of college and come work here?" So I worked at a hedge fund for like 3 1/2 - 4 years after that.

Laurence:
Wow, so that was an awesome story, thanks so much for sharing. I just had all these ideas because one thing that people ask me all the time, actually two different things. One, should they leave college to pursue programming, coding, whatever you want to call it, full-time? So instead of finishing their degree. I would just love to hear any thoughts you have on that as someone who did leave college their junior year, anything you could say to that end.

Avi:
When I dropped out, I had a job. I don't know, honestly given how I was doing in college, I don't know what other, it would have taken me seven years to graduate. So I don't know what I would have done then. I wasn't just going to drop out and do nothing or try to be a programmer without a job offer at 19 and very little experience besides the one startup I'd worked for from 16-18.

The demand for programmers now is even higher than it was then. Especially it was busy after the dot com boom and people thought it was a fad. So I would not have dropped out had I not had this job offer, but at some point I would have had to take hold of my life and realize that, okay, I'm going nowhere pretty slowly, so what do I want to do? At 19 or 20, I was pretty happy putting off that decision. But then I had this offer and I was looking around at my life and I was like, "Okay, college isn't really working out, this is a pretty good job offer." I went to an academic advisor in Wisconsin and she told me, she was like, "Look, there are kids that are graduating with way better grades than you'll ever have that don't get these jobs." You can always come back to the University of Wisconsin, you cannot always get this job, so you should take it." And I was like,
"Done."

I remember, when I started at the hedge fund, I was really worried for awhile. I was in way over my head and I was really worried that I'd have to go back to school. I really, once I started working, I realized how screwed I was in terms of how much behind I was in classes in college, so I remember feeling nothing short of desperation when I was beginning at the hedge fund, like, "I need to be a programmer, otherwise I have to go back to school." And I didn't realize it then but that was a long dark tunnel with uncertain outcomes for me. This had a certain outcome, which was that if I got good enough at this, I'd have a job and I wouldn't have to go back to school. I think desperation is a tough motivator. Like, those are some dark years in my life. But it does keep you motivated, it's just a little scary.

Laurence:
Yeah, I think that's a great point that you brought up. That you did have a job offer, it's not like you just left to pursue becoming a programmer full-time, there was another opportunity there for you that you got to do instead.

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And of course, everything worked out for you, because now you are one of the co-founders at Flatiron School. So how did that happen, from working at a hedge fund and then creating a school for people to learn how to code.

Avi:
Yeah, actually if I was going to mention one thing about the opportunity thing, I think a lot about opportunity, and there's this old quote by Thomas Edison that most people miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work. Which is to say that, it wasn't like, I think that if you want to drop out of college and you don't have an opportunity, it is your job to create an opportunity worth dropping out for. That looks
like overalls and is a lot of work.

It's not as though I was this 19 year old person that woke up one day and was like, "I want to be a programmer, I need a job offer from a hedge fund, let me get one." I had been making that investment slowly over a long period of time. Then I did work at the fund to do some really simple web design work and things like that and it kind of, I put myself in over my head and gave myself deadlines and if you're really considering an alternate path in your life that isn't a 4-year degree, whether it's for programming or film or whatever, you should just realize that the reason why it is the path less traveled is because it is hard. It is very difficult, and it's a lot of focus and work and doesn't pay off immediately.

Even with the hedge fund, I wasn't making a ton of money immediately. It took me a long time to kind of figure out, one, how to manage my own money and I lived with my parents and they were an hour commute, I was taking the subway two ways to work. Then I finally got an apartment but I didn't really know how to manage budgets and I ended up going into credit card debt even though I had this job at a hedge fund and it's just, it was a rocky road.

What ended up happening was I figured out that I really loved programming at the hedge fun. I loved doing it professionally. It was no longer a means to an end or something I did on the side in hopes of one day becoming a film critic or director or writer. It was what I wanted. I loved doing it. It got me out of college and gave me something that I felt was safer than the poor way I was walking the college education road.
After 3 1/2 years at the hedge fund, I started getting into the startup community and the open source community in New York. I still wanted to be a programmer, I just wanted to work at startups more and I wanted to work on open source software more. So, towards the end of the hedge fund, I started learning about Python and Ruby. I was kind of evaluating those language because I guess I really like getting intimate with a language.

Today, I think people are facing a lot of choices of what to learn. I don't know how, maybe there just wasn't that many there, I didn't know about that many languages, but I was just like, "Okay, I know .NET, I know C#, I know a little PHP, I know some Perl. I don't want to program in those languages. I need a new language. All the cool kids are talking about Ruby and Python. I looked at both of them and I started learning both of them. I liked Ruby a little more, it reminded me more of the things I loved about ASP and Perl. I basically just started figuring out how to learn Ruby and I bought all the books and I started going to Ruby meetups and playing with Rails which was like not even officially out yet.

As I was doing that, a friend of mine had an idea for a startup and I was still working at the hedge fund so I decided that me and him would do this startup and we were going to build a website for architects and interior designers to find and manage building products. So if you're an interior designer and you're designing a hotel, you need to find barstools and ceiling tiles and all sorts of products, how do you find them, how do you manage them. I said I would build that in Ruby on Rails.

I moonlighted for 6 months at the hedge fund. I would go to work, 9-5 and do my code for the hedge fund, then I'd go home and program all day and all night. And then on the weekends on the startup. After a few months we had a prototype built. We showed it to his boss who was an architect, his boss was like, "Hey, yeah this looks pretty cool. I'll give you guys some money for this." He basically got three of his other friends to give us $25,000 each so we then we had $100,000 in this new startup. Only then did I quit the hedge fund. Again, I wasn't jumping ship to some unknown startup future. I mean, I was, but at least we had some funding, right? We had a prototype, people were interested in it. It wasn't like that was my first one I tried.

While I was at the hedge fund, that last year, I tried to get like seven companies off the ground with like seven different people. None of them really got to that critical threshold where they become something real until that one. And that's when I jumped. That's also, I had committed to learning Ruby on Rails by that point, so I started doing that full-time while I built the next version of the site and learned about startups and started the company. We did that, I ran that for around four years.

Then after that I was like 28 and I was pretty tired and I was a little disenchanted with how the startup was growing and I decided I wanted to leave. I told my co-founder that I was going to be leaving. At that point I had learned a little more about how to save and manage money so I was not in debt. And I had basically saved enough so that I didn't have to work for a year. That's what I planned on doing because I was 28, I was pretty exhausted. I had never really taken a break so I left my startup. I really was doing nothing. I was doing a lot of yoga, I went down to Nicaragua and surfed for a while, but I also started teaching these nights and weekends classes on Skillshare. Teaching people how to program. It was 2008.

I remember a lot of my friends that went to some really great universities that became lawyers and investment bankers were really disenchanted with their lives. A lot of people I talked to kind of felt that way in my age group, kind of late 20s. It was like, man, this whole doing something you don't really love kind of sucks. Then it turns out that it's not even that secure and they can take it away from you whenever they want. I don't know, I wanted to show them, or you can control your own destiny and have this real skill that's really in demand that's actually kind of fun if you learn about it in the right ways.

I started teaching these classes and people really liked them and had fun learning how to program. I was such a bad teacher at that point. My format was basically a four hour lecture. But it was like, they just did it. I would have these students in these casual nights and weekends classes that were really good and really committed to getting better. I would basically take on contract work because at that point, between running some programming meetups, I had built enough of a brand around myself that I could get contract work pretty easily. So I'd take on contract work and I'd subcontract to the students and kind of mentor them through their project and I'd introduce them to clients and the client would pay me a placement fee for me letting them hire my developers. I was like, "This is kind of fun."

I did that for a year, after that it became less casual. I started teaching every day of the week, everywhere I could. Corporate training, nights and weekends, every night. Just constantly finding the best students in my classes that really wanted to change careers. Just mentoring them until I got them a job. Then I met my co-founder Adam and I kind of told him that story of what I'd been doing the last year and there had been some article written about it and he was like, "Yeah, let's start a school, let's do that, let's just teach people how to code and get them jobs." So that is how I ended up here.

Laurence:
So what year was that in?

Avi:
2012.

Laurence:
Okay, so that's when you started Flatiron. The whole year before you were doing Skillshare classes and mentoring and projects and then connecting some of the people you were helping learn to employers. That's very similar, of course on a larger scale, what you guys are doing at Flatiron.

Avi:
Yeah.

Laurence:
Wow, so you definitely gave a lot of great, you have a very inspiring story I think. I definitely think learning how to code can just open up so many doors in so many different ways, whether you want a new career or you want to start your own business. Whether you want to help others and so on.

Avi:
Yeah, I think that, I always advise my students that learning how to code to start your own business or your own startup is probably not the best way to do that. It's one thing if you want to learn how to code and become a freelance programer, designer or something like that or work as a contractor. But if you think, I always tell people that there's way more to running a startup than your ability to code. If your idea is that, "I've got this good idea and I know I can make a million or ten million dollars with it, all I need to do is learn how to program," I think you're underestimating all the other steps in between that. It is very possible to build a product that no one uses. You need to market it. It's possible to build a program that's marketed but doesn't generate any revenue and that's called business and sales. So again, I caution people into thinking that the difference between Mark Zuckerberg and a non-Mark Zuckerberg is that he could program.

Laurence:
Great. So, we're wrapping up here and I just want to ask you one final question. If you could just share some advice for other people learning on their own, so people who are maybe out of college and they don't have a CS degree, or maybe even younger folks that are still in high school or college even.

Avi:
Yeah. I have a lot of advice. I would say that, along the path of learning how to program, or I think which is essentially like change or self-actualization for a lot of people. Yes, you are going to learn how to code also, but you are learning a whole new way to think and to work and to be disciplined and think about your career.

I think that on that path there are a lot of distractions. There are shiny new JavaScript frameworks every day. There's another article about imposter syndrome, there's another article about how hiring in tech is broken, there's another article about how CS degrees are absolutely required. Then there's like some flame war on Hacker News, there's a lot of stuff that can distract you.

The only thing that matters is your ability to learn and to code. That's it. You don't need to learn every language. You don't need to be an expert in everything. You don't need to be reading Hacker News every day, you don't need to be checking Reddit, you don't need to be worried about if the language you're currently learning is going to be obsolete in ten years. You don't need to worry about what the interview process is going to be like and whether they're going to take you seriously. You don't need to be worried about if you don't have a college degree and is that going to be a problem. None of that stuff matters right now.

You just got to get a singular focus, which is, how do you learn and how does code work? That's it. Everything else is way down the road. You'll figure out how to interview when you get there, but right now you can barely program, so you're not going on any interviews, just get good at stuff. Yeah, maybe once you get a job you're going to be in over your head and you're going to feel like a total imposter. Join the club. We all deal with it. You just can't let that stuff, it's going to slow you down and demotivate you to the point where you're going to start questioning whether or not you really want this. The second that happens, I think the battle is mostly lost. Because you have outs and you have excuses you can give yourself for why you're not reading and why you're not learning and why you're not building something. Because 'I don't really think I can do it and I don't know if they're really going to take me seriously and maybe I don't even want to do this,' and that's it.

That's why I said in the beginning, I think that a certain amount of just desperation, just a realistic understanding of your life is of your own design and everything's within your own control and that if it's not the way you want it to be working out, there's only one person to blame and it's you. Just get desperate about learning this stuff and then realize that everything else in life is a distraction then. What Kim Kardashian is doing this week doesn't matter, what Donald Trump said doesn't matter.

Just learn to code, that's it. You don't do that forever. It's going to go away, you're going to hit a point of proficiency where you won't be desperate any more and you'll have this fluency, but during that process it's a singular focus. You don't ask questions about how much longer it's going to take, because that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it takes you 4 months or 6 months or 12 months or 18 months or 24 months, once you hit that threshold where you can code and get a job as a programmer, it's all different. If 24 months sounds like too long to make that investment, then I don't know what to tell you. There's an old joke about, how long does it take to catch a fish? I'm not sure, but getting out of the boat surely doesn't help. So, that's what I think.

Laurence:
Yeah, that was awesome advice, thank you. I think, I really love the part about staying focused and not letting things distract you. I totally feel the people who think their way out of things. I used to suffer from that. Thinking too much and not really taking action and focusing and then ending up not really going toward something I really wanted to do because I kind of let myself think myself out of it. Thank you so much Avi, and where can people find you online?

Avi:
I am on Twitter @aviflombaum and flatironschool.com.

Laurence:
Alright, awesome, we'll definitely link those up in the Show Notes page. Thank you so much again.

Avi:
Great, thanks.

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Again, the Show Notes for this episode plus a full transcript can be found at learntocodewith.me/podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, head on over to my website learntocodewith.me where you can find even more awesome code-related content, like my 10 Free Tips for Teaching Yourself How to Code. Again, the url is learntocodewith.me. Thanks so much for tuning in, and I'll see
you next week!

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