Thursday, September 29, 2011

A Personal Note About Why I'm Excited To Teach At CodeLesson.com

My younger brother used to call me Doctor Murdock or "Doc" Murdock. Seems like another life know, but I was a baseball pitcher until the end of high school. I always had a pretty mean fastball and wicked curve ball. I struck out a lot of batters. Dwight "Doc" Gooden was the NY Mets ace when I was in little league and he struck a lot of people out. Since I was a huge fan, my brother liked using Gooden's nickname for me and it stuck. That wasn't the only reason he coined that nickname for me. Since I was always trying to teach people around me the stuff I was learning, the name fit both ways. To be fair, my brother also in his best Han Solo impersonation yelling at C-3PO called me "The Professor" too. I loved both nick names.

I liked the sound of "Doc" Murdock so much in and out of baseball that I seriously considered becoming a medical doctor. I enrolled in AP Biology in high school but couldn't make it past frog dissection!

I still thought about becoming Doctor Murdock for real. Since I was heavily into computers through high school, I started thinking about becoming an actual professor. When I got to college for my bachelor's degree in computer science, I enrolled in the Honors program to try and position myself for moving on to higher education. I graduated with honors in comp sci, but I never went back to school for a masters degree. Building apps and life were just to much fun to go back into the ivory tower! I thought the door to becoming Doctor Murdock was closed forever.

When CodeLesson founder Jeffrey McManus asked me who would be good to teach iOS development, I really wanted to do it, but didn't have time in my schedule. Once my schedule freed up, I consider myself lucky that Jeff hadn't found an instructor yet. Sorry Jeff! He graciously accepted my offer to teach Introduction to iOS Programming.

The door to becoming "Doc" Murdock feels like it just cracked open, and it feels great to finally pursue this dream, even a little bit.