Episode 54 – Creating Software Development from Chemistry

Meet Ken Luk. Ken graduated with a degree in biology and worked as an industrial chemist full time. But like many of us, his former job lacked the excitement and creativity that he so desired. In one fell swoop, Ken left his job and traveled halfway across the country to attend a coding bootcamp, where he fell in love with software development. Listen in to episode 54 to hear about Ken’s journey, why he made the change and how he feels about his decision.

Don’t forget to say hello to Ken on Twitter!

Ken Luk’s Bio:

After working as a math and science at Mason Academy, Ken Luk attended Dev Bootcamp and became a software developer in 2014. Less than a year later, he was working in mobile app development, where he currently works today. Ken helped bring three main projects to fruition since the start of his software development journey.

* The Dev Bootcast podcast. Ken documenting his experiences with this coding bootcamp.

* Survey Gorilla. This was modeled after Survey Monkey and allows people to create and take surveys, and view the aggregated survey results.

* NodeHopper.  This is a recommendation engine that suggests new interests across movies, music, books, and more.

Episode Highlights and Show Notes:

Arsalan: Hi everyone. Today my guest is Ken Luk. Ken, how are you?

Ken: I’m doing pretty well. How are you doing, Arsalan?

Arsalan: I’m doing pretty good. Your path and your journey into software development are a little bit different from my other guests. This has become a trend now, but that’s what I love about these interviews. I get to me all these people. So, you’re now an android developer for an android consultancy company in Michigan, but before that, you were doing something completely different. What industry were you in?

Ken: I studied sciences and ended up working as an industrial chemist. So, it’s a pretty big change.

Arsalan: Is that what you studied in college?

Ken: No. I actually studied biology, but I took a ton of chemistry so I was able to work in that field.

Arsalan: Did you graduate with the degree?

Ken: Yes. I received a bachelor’s of science in biology from UCLA.

Arsalan: That’s a very good school and an interesting degree. You did that for a while, but that wasn’t cutting it for you. What was missing?

Ken: Prior to the chemistry job, I also worked as an EMT. Just as with that job, it was super interesting at first. But over time you start encountering the same scenarios over and over again and the job becomes pretty predictable. I wanted to find a job that has less of a ceiling in terms of what you’re going to see every day. Software development is what I ended up settling with.

Arsalan: Do you remember your first encounter with programming?

Ken: It was probably prior to considering software development as a career. I was trying to work on a personal website and trying to figure out how to modify some JavaScript to do something slightly different that I wanted on my website. That was my first exposure to programming.

Arsalan: How did that feel?

Ken: It was very confusing because I didn’t have the experience to really understand what the background code was doing. So, it was pretty much a bunch of guesswork trying to get it to work the way I wanted it to.

Arsalan: So, you were working on your personal website and you needed some JavaScript, and you figured that you’d better learn some. Yet, you weren’t really that interested in doing this full time or as a career. You just wanted to work on your website. Is that right?

Ken: Yes. I would say this was a couple of years before I considered software development as a career. I always thought the programming aspect is a little boring. I never thought I would want to stare at the screen, but now I love the problem-solving and logic aspects ...